Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist
A rare opportunity to view the work of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most adventurous and experimental modernist artists.
Made in the Pacific: A Collection of Tāoga
A selection of Pacific tāoga from the Canterbury Museum in conversation with contemporary artworks that highlight the continued strength in culture and traditional art forms.
Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua
A comprehensive survey spanning the artist's career.
E tuwhera ana te wharetoi i kā rā e 7 o te wiki, 10am - 5pm
Ka tuwhera ki te 9pm i kā pō Wenerei
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Uruka utukore, ahokore utukore
Free entry, free wifi
Postcard From...
Postcard From...
I moved to Paris in December to join my French partner and pursue my art history research and writing. We live in Rueil-Malmaison, west of central Paris, where there is an abundance of boulangeries and patisseries (many of which were even open on Christmas Day!), fruit and vegetable markets, cheese shops, and parks including the Parc de Bois-Préau and the lovely Parc des Impressionnistes which is situated beside the Seine. However, the area is most famous for the Château de Malmaison, the former private residence of Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress Joséphine. The château dates from the seventeenth century and displays Jacques-Louis David’s masterpiece, Napoleon Crossing the Alps.
Artist Profile
Charles Meryon: Etcher of Banks Peninsula
French explorers, natural historians, whalers and Catholic missionaries were increasingly present in the south-west Pacific from the mid-eighteenth century, but there was also a political thread in this activity. During the 1820s some in France saw New Zealand as a potential penal colony, and the project that saw a handful of French colonists settle on Banks Peninsula in 1840 made an official French presence in the region even more appropriate. This took the form of a French naval base, the ‘New Zealand station’, established at Akaroa in 1840.
Commentary
Raising the Stakes
On the opening of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū Jenny Harper, then at Victoria University Wellington, wrote that the challenge for the newly opened Gallery was ‘to raise the stakes by acknowledging it is no longer the McDougall but is poised to become the force in the New Zealand art scene that Christchurch deserves.’ When, three years later, she became director of the Gallery, that’s exactly what she set out to achieve on several fronts. One of those was developing the collection.
Interview
Sometimes Going Back Is A Way Of Going Forward
John Stezaker is an English conceptual artist, acknowledged as a significant influence on the YBA generation. He has been working since the mid-1970s, while achieving international acclaim for his work in the past fifteen years. His exhibition Lost World opens at Christchurch Art Gallery in March 2018. He spoke to senior curator Lara Strongman on a visit to Aotearoa New Zealand in August 2017.
Collection
Louis Le Breton Baie d'Akaroa
Louis Le Breton was an artist accompanying the French explorer Dumont D’Urville’s voyages throughout the Pacific, North America and Antarctica between 1837 and 1840. D’Urville’s two ships, the Astrolabe and the Zélée, both seen here alongside a pair of whaling ships, visited Akaroa in April 1840 where they sought respite from the open ocean and replenishment of their supplies. It was a significant time for the region: a month later, at nearby Ōnuku, local rangatira (chiefs) Iwikau and Hone Tikao signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi / the Treaty of Waitangi, Aotearoa New Zealand’s founding document. This was followed by the arrival of French and German settlers on the ship Comte de Paris in August.
(Ship Nails and Tail Feathers, 10 June – 22 October 2023)
Notes
On the beach by Charles Simpson
This article first appeared as 'Seaside outing displays a lightness of touch' in The Press on 24 April 2018.
Collection
Chris Corson-Scott Mark Adams Retouching Photographs at Studio La Gonda
Chris Corson-Scott’s photographs offer a strategy of poetic resistance to the hypermediated digital era. Made with analogue film and an old-fashioned large format 8x10 view camera, his works are enlarged to a scale we’re more familiar with in paintings – and the detail visible at this scale encourages us to take a slow look. He is interested in sites in which the material presence of the past is still visible. Here, in a work that speaks eloquently to the modern history of New Zealand photography, he has depicted senior New Zealand photographer Mark Adams in the studio he has shared for the past few decades with fellow analogue photographer Haru Sameshima. Adams is at work retouching his portrait of the painter Tony Fomison, which he made many decades ago.
(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)
