Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Disruptive Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Japan
Quietly powerful and immersive video works revealing the politics behind our view of landscape.
John Vea: Ini Mini Mani Mou
Powerful new work examining the complexities of the immigration process in Aotearoa New Zealand.
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Exploring the relationship between tākata and whenua – people and land – through Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
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Collection
Fiona Connor What you bring with you to work
Fiona Connor is known for subtle interventions that invite us to consider how we use and inhabit different spaces. This domestic window (one of nine in a larger series) occupies both actual and imagined territory. Embedded directly into the wall, it allows rare and disconcerting access to the Gallery’s underlying structure. Fiona’s windows are also meticulously reconstructed replicas, based on the real-life bedroom windows of gallery attendants from the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, where the work was first shown. The memory of their dreams and imaginings complicates our view, as the personal oozes into the institutional.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024)
Article
De-Building
For many passers-by, Christchurch art Gallery is identified by its dramatic glass façade—the public face it presents to the world. but De-Building is an exhibition that offers a very different view. bringing together the work of fourteen artists from new Zealand and farther afield, this group exhibition draws inspiration from the working spaces gallery-goers seldom see: the workshops, loading bays and back corridors; the scruffy, half-defined zones.
Collection
Ronnie van Hout House and School
Ronnie van Hout’s installation recreates his childhood home in Aranui, a suburb of eastern Christchurch, and his primary school in nearby Wainoni. A looped video replays his daily bike ride between the two locations. Together, these elements present the story of van Hout’s beginnings.
Familiar architectural structures, however, are taken beyond the ordinary by the presence of a hovering, makeshift UFO, whose surveillance results appear on a nearby monitor. Can we read this as a picture of suburban childhood experience as an alien might see it, or as the artist’s memorial to the need for imaginative survival and escape?
(Above ground, 2015)
Collection
Archibald Nicoll Industrial Area
Ōtautahi Christchurch-based Archibald Nicoll found good, paintable material not far from his Cambridge Terrace studio in the lines of warehouses, factories and cars on Tuam Street. Industrial Area sold quickly when exhibited at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in 1941, and supports his reputation as a leader in what became known as the Canterbury School of painting. Nicoll created a captivating work through practised painterly skill and a subtle palette, convincingly portraying the scene in long shadow and low winter light.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Collection
Bill Sutton Private Lodgings
Bill Sutton’s Private Lodgings captures a sense of the history of a notorious Ōtautahi Christchurch boarding house, the Manchester Private Hotel. This hundred-room, three-storeyed timber boarding house on the corner of Manchester and Southwark Streets had fallen into disrepair. The hotel’s address appears frequently in newspaper reports, starting with repeated requests for replacement porters and kitchen staff. Next to these were frequent court reports documenting varied misdemeanours, its occupants including bankrupts, petty criminals, arsonists, thieves, trespassers, vagrants and one murderer. Further reports spoke of damage from frequent room fires as well as unchecked borer, dry rot and rats, and the late discovery that it operated without a license, leading ultimately to its demolition in 1963.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Collection
L S Lowry Factory At Widnes
L. S. Lowry’s best-known paintings present rhythmic crowds of ‘matchstick figures’ spilling across tightly constructed northern English industrial and urban landscapes. The sparser setting of Factory at Widnes presents one of Britain’s grimmest environments, a birthplace of the chemical industry. Some have interpreted the trio of strolling bowler-hatted figures as factory managers, others as perhaps visiting comics – Charlie Chaplin and transatlantic duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were still in the public eye when this was painted, and two of the three had performed in Widnes. Lowry had developed his own uniquely comical outlook over forty-two years while treading the streets of Manchester as a rent collector with the same company, from which he retired on full pension in 1952. This part of his story was long kept hidden from an admiring public.
(Leaving for Work 2 October 2021 - 1 May 2022)
Collection
Giovanni Battista Piranesi Veduta della Gran Curia Innocenziana
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, son of a Venetian stone- mason and master builder, trained in architecture and stage design before moving to Rome and training there as an engraver. Producing many picturesque Grand Tour views of Rome, he was hugely influential on the classical revival in European architecture. In Rome in 1755 he befriended the visiting architect Robert Adam, who praised Piranesi in a letter to his brother in London:
'[S]o amazing and ingenious fancies as he has produced in the different plans of the Temples, Baths and Palaces and other buildings I never saw and are the greatest fund for inspiring and instilling invention in any lover of architecture that can be imagined.'
(Above ground, 2015)
Collection
James Fitzgerald View Of Cathedral Square From Hereford Street
Edinburgh-born commercial artist James Fitzgerald exhibited this meticulously rendered view of Cathedral Square in Ōtautahi Christchurch alongside another titled A Corner in the Square. The two paintings were described as “large street scenes, very bright and almost photographic in quality”. One reviewer found their “frank realism … notable” but also expressed the wish “that an artist of such ability had employed his imagination to greater advantage”. This work, however, was published by several Te Ika-a-Maui / North Island newspapers alongside the heading “Fidelity in Painting”. When shown again at the Otago Society of Arts in November, a reviewer deemed this one the less successful, being “not so well handled, and considerably overstated in colour passages”. Putting vintage quibbles aside, Summer Evening in the City may be recognised as something rare, recording a now unrecognisable view from High Street into Cathedral Square, on a balmy 1930s evening in raking summer light.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Collection
Louise Henderson Addington Workshops
Louise Henderson was a Paris-born interior and embroidery designer who moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1925. In her earliest paintings, from 1933 on, she was regularly drawn to urban and industrial subject matter such as city streets, brickworks and rock quarries. She became a key figure in local art circles, including as part of The Group, and influential in the development of a Canterbury landscape painting style. The Addington Railway Workshops opened in Christchurch in 1879 and closed in 1990, at its height employing over a thousand people. In its depiction of workers assembling locally produced locomotives, Henderson’s fascinating composition reflects something of her left-leaning political interests through the 1930s and 1940s.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)