Richard Killeen came to the fore in the 1960s as a painter of oddly stilled and poster-like scenes of sub- urban New Zealand life. He consolidated his growing reputation in the late 1970s when he made the first of his ‘cut-outs’, in which compositional elements were cleanly sliced from pieces of aluminium and allowed to hang in variable arrangements on the gallery wall. For the last two decades Killeen has expanded and deepened the range and possibilities of the ‘cut-out’ format. By the mid-1980s, each individual piece had begun to bustle with images culled from a vast range of sources. In Book of the Hook he concocts a pseudo-museum of anthropological fragments, all 253 of which come from an invented organisation called the ‘Hook Museum’.

Wunderbox (28 November 2008 -15 February 2009)

Purchased, 2000
Reproduced courtesy of Richard Killeen
Acrylic on aluminium
2000/194.1-253
1996