Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 i Art New Zealand

The atrium of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, once part of a large department store, is a busy space in architectural terms, and to view any artwork located on the Big Wall of the mezzanine floor you must approach obliquely, a glimpse at a time, moving towards the vantage points and angles created by the various balconies, landings and stair-railings. Overhead hangs suspended Neil Dawson’s Cones (2000), a five-part sculpture airily dominating the upper atrium area, while Rebecca Baumann’s Light Interference (Spectral Transmission) (2022), a translucent layer of dichroic film that runs the length of the skylight, continuously transforms the walls and floor of the atrium with washes of spectral colour, depending on what the sun is doing. Within this volatile environment, as if at the foot of a rainbow,…

Suspended Time In the depths of lockdown, Hayley Theyers created Miniature Otherworlds—photographic tableaux when the world was simultaneously shrinking and expanding. The fantastical creatures and landscapes set against an inky blackness suspend the logical and the everyday. Magic is Afoot shows Pegasus and hares—a gathering of familiars. Managing the unreality of the pandemic meant channelling otherworldly realms that had their own logic. Mythic Time This interest in fairytales, echoes of Jungian psychology and surrealism expands beyond lockdown. Theyers’ interest in these Otherworlds has been an ongoing one. A tapestry of death personified, lush textures, the natural world as signposts to wisdom or warning. Rituals not to explain the world as much as to delve into its mysteries. Creatures are liminal, occupying the interstices: seahorses as bridges between land and sea;…

Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist by Mark Forman Auckland University Press, Auckland 2025 MICHAEL DUNN Some 35 years after his death it is timely to publish a thoroughly researched account of Tony Fomison’s unorthodox and disturbing life. Known as a painter for his often dark and troubling imagery of undeniable power, he remains a somewhat enigmatic figure whose art is individual and whose personality is largely mysterious and overshadowed by rumour and anecdote. Those who knew him personally often knew only part of his character and little of his origins and formative influences. That is why the publication of a lengthy, detailed account of his life based on more than ten years’ research by Mark Forman is a welcome event. That Forman did not know Fomison in person can…

Auckland Michael Reed Behrouz Boochani Suite Artis Gallery, 10–30 March DINA JEZDIĆ How do we commemorate events that define our times? How do we honour lives and struggles that challenge dominant historical narratives? These questions lie at the heart of Michael Reed’s Behrouz Boochani Suite, the centrepiece of Origins, an exhibition by Medal Artists New Zealand (MANZ) at Artis Gallery, where he is the inaugural focus artist. Reed’s work does not celebrate power—it indicts it. His medals are not honours but counter-memorials, objects of protest that refuse to let us forget the suffering wrought by authoritarian rule, displacement and systemic violence. At the core of the Boochani Suite is a stark confrontation with contemporary despots—Trump, Putin, Kim Jongun—leaders who operate with impunity, leaving devastation in their wake. Reed’s imagery evokes…

In an Artforum review of the 2024 exhibition Duty of Care (Part One) at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Toni Ross asked a generative question regarding the presence of healing in western contemporary art. Specifically, in relation to two works by Kathy Barry, she posited, ‘but while care for animistic otherness may be easily accepted in Indigenous art, are we as ready to accede to such notions in contemporary Western practices?’1 While the phrase ‘care for animistic otherness’ addresses only one aspect of indigenous art practices and is quite incomplete as a descriptive term for Barry’s work, it nevertheless serves as a useful pivot towards situating the presence of healing in western contemporary art, and in particular, Barry’s healing practice over the past 13 years. Duty of Care is…

At the end of our interview, Layla Walter hands me a small, amber-coloured vessel. Its unexpected weight drives my hands suddenly floorward. It is bizarre that a thing ostensibly made of light should feel so heavy; it is satisfying that this little vessel’s uncanny weight seems to reflect not its mass, but the skill and meaning it carries. Walter describes each of her vessels as being like a ‘three-dimensional canvas’,1 and there is something planetary about the way light wraps around their edges. Plotting each design requires a cartographer’s perspective as well as foresight that verges on clairvoyance. She uses strings to measure the figures, mapping the placement of a kererū and a swag of berries around the circumference of a form. Will she carve in negative onto plaster, giving…

Fifty years is a long time. For an individual certainly, yet even more so for a business. It seems even longer in the art world, where longevity is an attribute that is not applauded enough. In 2025 Gordon Harris Fine Art & Graphic Store is achieving this milestone. In 1975 Gordon and Ann Harris took an entrepreneurial punt and established a new arts supply business. They chose Greenwoods Corner in the Auckland suburb of Epsom for the new premises and sold fine arts and graphic supplies to a growing market. It was not easy at the beginning: import restrictions were strict and it was difficult to source a wide range of products. Winsor & Newton supplies, for example, were the best known, thanks to their English origin, arriving here alongside…

In their recent work, Pavilion, Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux present a scaffolded arrangement of glass terrariums containing Calystegia silvatica—a commonly occurring garden plant known as convolvulus, considered by many to be a weed. Held in space by 3D-printed scaffold joins, and bathed in the pinkish glow of grow lights, this humble plant is elevated, challenging its lowly classification and, in turn, our very human need to categorise and hold dominion over the natural world. These plants, and the 3D-printed joins, were grown side by side in Bellamy and Fauteux’s studio during their time as Frances Hodgkins Fellows in 2024. I visited their studio during this cultivation period and was immediately struck by the precarity of what they were trying to achieve. Would the 3D printer hold up to the…

Simon Richardson is one of those rare artists able to make us see what he sees. He is able to steep us in his vision, and so transform the world around us through the power of a paintbrush and an unwavering gaze. His gift is for making the ordinary legible and enduring and remarkable. His paintwork yields a myriad of small truths, brushstroke by brushstroke: a woollen cap, a Formica tabletop, the moment of twilight, the translucence of a glass plate, the delicate moistness of an eye, the palpable physiognomy of a human face. As a portrait painter he can capture people in the round, in their particularity—and in their mystery, their separateness. Any portrait painting is a contract between sitter and artist. The person being painted is a foil…

It’s always a shock to learn that someone with whom you once shared time, stories and ideas is gone. And, along with reminders of our own fragile relationship with life, come floods of memories. I first met Paul Radford back in 1976, at the Elam School of Fine Arts, where we were both 19-year-old students trying to unravel the mysteries of ourselves, the art world and that mercurial institution called art school. In his early art incarnations, Paul painted meticulous magical realist interior landscapes reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth. In that youthful sphere of learning, however, styles changed with the wind, so it wasn’t long before he moved on. During those restless art-school days, we talked. A lot. About life, the art careers we had chosen, and the lives that had…

Leo Bensemann (1912–1986) was around 53 years old and had been exhibiting and publishing his art for more than 30 years when Golden Bay and Near Collingwood—the earliest of the 36 paintings and drawings included in the exhibition Leo Bensemann: Paradise Garden at Christchurch Art Gallery—were exhibited in the 1965 Group show; these were the first landscape paintings from the Tākaka/Golden Bay/Mōhau region at the northwestern tip of the South Island he had ever shown. They were the first but far from being the last. Over the next two decades, almost up to his death, Bensemann exhibited more than 60 paintings and drawings of the region both at Group shows between 1965 and 1977 (when the Group ceased to exist) and at his own solo exhibitions in Akaroa (1972), Christchurch…