Despite its sombre character, Petrus van der Velden’s Burial in the Winter on the Island of Marken is a work that has long captivated Ōtautahi Christchurch audiences. Colloquially known as The Dutch Funeral, it shows mourners crossing a snowbound landscape, reflecting the hardships of life, both unforeseen and seasonal, in a nineteenth-century fishing community in the Netherlands. It remains an expressive testament to sorrow and loss. Recent discoveries aided by historian Jan Schild, a Marken resident and meticulous researcher, deepen that emotional register.

Continued

The laptop fires up and a dreamlike virtual world materialises. Exquisite peacocks – glassy black, ethereal white – emerge on a moonlit stage, framed by icy blue branching patterns. A cast of swans glide through a luminous, rippling lake in measured arcs, their movements both urgent and graceful. In other scenes, two royal lovers – bound by fate, divided by unseen forces – circle one another, mirroring gestures of longing and hesitation.

Continued

The art history of Aotearoa New Zealand includes a subgenre of landscape painting that is often under recognised, but enlivens the story of this country in gritty, illuminating ways. Investigating the twentieth-century painters who focused on the urban and industrial exposes a rich seam of material, with subject-matter ranging from gasworks, hydroelectric plants and foundries to factories, warehouses and cityscapes, workshops, wharves and railway yards. The artists are a combination of well known and less familiar names, but it is notable that this direction developed most strongly among the Ōtautahi Christchurch-trained: two-thirds of the artists in From Here on the Ground attended the Canterbury College School of Art, where many also taught. It was a training ground regarded as among the most progressive in the Southern Hemisphere for several decades in the first half of the century.

Continued