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
Julia Morison Tootoo
Julia Morison’s Tootoo was created as part of a brim-full series of multi-panelled paintings called Gargantua’s Petticoat. The series is an array of riotous provocation, full of abstracted sensual forms that allude to corsetry and piercings, petticoats and hula hoops, bed springs and bandages. Julia was painting lecturer at the University of Canterbury from 1999–2007. This followed eight years living in France, an originally unanticipated outcome of being awarded the one-year Moët et Chandon Fellowship artist residency in 1990.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Simon Morris June Pause
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
Packed with an energetic sense of movement, Simon Morris’s painting gives the effect of a boldly rhythmic musical score. Its pattern, appearing at first to be random or chaotic, is found to be sequenced and repeating, and with diagonals regularly breaking up the picture plane.
Morris builds on the legacy of pioneering New Zealand geometric abstractionists such as Carl Sydow and Gordon Walters. This optical sequence was generated by a mathematical formula, which he says “creates images that I wouldn’t come up with myself. It’s like the system partly makes the work.”
Collection
Mark Braunias Mang
Mark Braunias has applied a kind of speculative genetic engineering to the work of Walt Disney, Andy Warhol and the surrealist Jean Arp, resulting in giant, amoeba-like versions of comic-book characters that appear ready to spring to life. A master of reassemblage and reinvention, Braunias makes his ‘quick draw’ from a vast cache of popular cultural and historical sources, while applying a quiet dose of wry intent. (Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)
Collection
Reuben Paterson Naturist
In Naturist Reuben Paterson revels in geometric patterns and sharp contrasts between black and white, reminiscent of 1960s hard-edged abstraction, op-art and Maori designs. The delicate, illusory effect Naturist has on the viewer is heightened by Paterson’s use of glitter, a recurring feature in his work.
Naturist draws on an installation at Riccarton House in 2004 where the artist created a black and white optical illusion of the landscape. Tapping into invisible, undulating energies left behind by Maori, Naturist is a study of how collective energies from the past are reflected in the land.
Paterson graduated from the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, in 1997. In the same year he was selected as one of three recipients of the Moet & Chandon Fellowship, awarding him a six-week residency in France.
Collection
Julian Dashper Untitled
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
The repurposed drumskin became a signature motif for Auckland-based Julian Dashper, whose conceptual art practice saw him develop an international exhibiting profile in the United States, Australia and Europe, before his untimely death in 2009.
Resonating with the American pop artist Jasper Johns’ 1950s target paintings, Dashper’s drumskin canvases were also made to honour a band of New Zealand’s pioneering modernists. In 1992 The Big Bang Theory saw him assembling full drumkits emblazoned with his heroes’ names: The Anguses, The Hoteres, The Colin McCahons, The Woollastons and The Drivers.
Collection
Mervyn Williams Chromatic Variations IX
This work is one a series of screenprints, the name of which reflects Mervyn Williams’ love of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music and also refers to variations in colour. He has said that Chromatic Variations IX can be looked at as if it was a Tibetan mandala, rather than simply being a design. Williams’ painting and printing have always centred on formal abstraction. In the Chromatic Variations series he abstracted forms in a complex manner and experimented with different colours in each print. Williams was born in Whakatane in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. In 1956 he met artist Ted Dutch (b. 1928) who got him interested in silk-screen work. Williams studied at Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland. He won First Prize in the Graphic Section of the Hay’s Art Award in 1966 and was represented in the ‘International Biennale Exhibition of Graphic Art’ in Tokyo in 1966 and 1972. Williams also won the New Zealand Print Council Samarkand Award in 1969.
Collection
Bridget Riley Elongated Triangles 4
This screenprint by English artist Bridget Riley presents a compressed, iridescent concertina of aqua green bands, wedged between tapering lines of orange and candy pink. Bridget’s major international debut was in The Responsive Eye, an exhibition held in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she showed two large, powerfully optical works in black-and-white and grey. She began creating related sharp-edged optical works in pure colour two years later.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Don Driver Energy Triad
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
The New Plymouth-based Don Driver worked from the mid-1970s until the 1990s on sculptural assemblages made from found materials. Echoing the work of American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose work Driver had experienced while visiting New York in 1965, Energy Triad makes assertive use of familiar, locally sourced items, placing pioneering farming tools alongside advertising and road signage, all with a meticulous eye to formal balance and arrangement.
Collection
Neil Dawson Whiteout
Neil Dawson’s sculptures consistently explore the slippage between appearance and reality. We think we see solid forms, but on closer inspection they turn out to be illusions.
Whiteout conveys Dawson’s fascination with these ideas and playfully challenges our perceptions of space and movement. This wall sculpture is reminiscent of the early structures of the Dadaists and Russian Constructivist sculptors Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) and Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962) in the early 20th century. Dawson is one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary site-specific artists. His innovative use of sculptural materials and principles of perspective are evident in this early example of his work.
Born in Christchurch, Dawson studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Melbourne. He has exhibited widely and has several major public installations in New Zealand and internationally.