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
My Favourite
Olivia Spencer Bower's Menzies Bay
This work of art paints connections for me – to people, to this landscape and this place. My great-great-grandparents John Henry Menzies and Francis Elizabeth Menzies settled here in the 1870s. I was intrigued to discover that, way back then, the Christchurch parochial attitude was already well established. When he purchased the land John Henry encountered difficulty at the land office; he wrote, ‘A map was the first step. I was a stranger. You must not, even now be a stranger in Canterbury. Not one of the clerks would take any notice of me. It was entirely a case of favouritism.’
Interview
The London Club
In September 2017, Gallery director Jenny Harper, curator Felicity Milburn and Jo Blair, of the Gallery Foundation’s contracted development services, Brown Bread, went to London, taking a group of supporters who received a very special tour of the city’s art highlights. While there, they further developed the Foundation’s new London Club. Recently they sat down together in Jenny’s office…
Commentary
Raiding the Minibar
When does history start? What is the time span of the present? When do the margins of the contemporary begin to dissolve into the past? Our collection-based exhibition, Your Hotel Brain, looks at a group of New Zealand artists who came to prominence in the 1990s. Collectively their work explores ideas that have been critical to art-making in Aotearoa New Zealand over the past twenty years. Identity politics, unreliable autobiographies and references to a broad spectrum of visual culture – including Black Sabbath’s music, prison tattoos, automotive burn-outs and our no-smoking legislation – traverse the contested ground of recent New Zealand art, linking the just-past with the emerging present. A selection of works from the exhibition are reproduced here.
Collection
Eleanor Hughes Untitled (Towards Lamorna Cove)
Eleanor Hughes was born in Christchurch, and she and her siblings studied at the Canterbury College School of Art. Eleanor began exhibiting with the Canterbury Society of Arts in 1902, and in 1905 travelled to England for further studies. She briefly returned to New Zealand, but in 1908 went back to England to continue her studies, joining the progressive Newlyn School in Cornwall. She married her fellow student, Robert (‘Bertie’) Morson Hughes, in 1910, and later that year they were in Christchurch, presenting a joint exhibition at the CSA Gallery in Durham Street. Back in England in 1911, they settled and became part of the newly-formed artist colony at Lamorna in Cornwall. They lived at ‘Chyangweal’, near St Buryan, above Lamorna Cove, for the rest of their lives, and Eleanor Hughes’s studio was in Lamorna Valley, about a mile from the house. This luminous watercolour landscape, was painted from an elevated position, looking across freshly cut fields and yellow haystacks to the purple heather-covered hills beyond, with the top of the granite quarry that dominates the Cove just visible.
(Turn, Turn, Turn: A Year in Art, 27 July 2019 – 8 March 2020)
Notes
Continuous positive I by Shannon Williamson
This article first appeared as 'A delicate look at how the body works' in The Press on 27 November 2017.
Collection
Julia Morison Rhombus B4
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
“I was working in formal abstraction and paring everything down and peeling everything away until there was virtually nothing there. Then I stopped work and started building everything up again. […]
“What interests me is that it’s a structure of opposites and so it’s a structure that is all encompassing. The opposites are held in tension and balance. It’s hierarchical, and therefore very unfashionable, but I don’t actually see you can avoid hierarchy if you’re constantly organising and ordering. Just putting one thing in front of another is a hierarchical process. The structure is like a map to work by, so that everything is seen in relation to its opposite or to the other parts. It just seemed a more holistic way for me to work.”
—Julia Morison, 1991
