What’s On
Night Market at the Gallery
Wine, beer, food, crafts, jewellery, ceramics, plants, candles, records, books, DJs (not for purchase) and more...
Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa
A major exhibition featuring works that tell stories about personal and collective histories, communication, distance and relationships to our environment.
Don't miss
Our Out of Time exhibition is closing soon.
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Free entry, free wifi
Success to Excess
Several early British portraits in the Gallery’s collection depict sitters whose identity is as yet unknown; pleasingly, their number has been reduced in recent years. One painting in particular—previously titled Portrait of a Gentleman in a Blue Jacket and Embroidered Waistcoat — is greatly enriched by having the story of a specific human life attached to it. It is also unexpectedly linked to other portraits in the collection.
Christchurch Art Gallery is ten: highs and lows
In recognition of the anniversary of the move of Christchurch's public art gallery from its former existence as the Robert McDougall in the Botanic Gardens to its new more central city location (now eerily empty), I've been asked by Bulletin's editor to recall some highs and lows of the last ten years. So here goes — and stay with me during this reflection, which takes the place of my usual foreword.
Fall tension tension wonder bright burn want
Curator Felicity Milburn on Tony Oursler and the grotesque.
Speaking sticks and moving targets
New works by Shane Cotton
The Hanging Sky brings together Shane Cotton's skyscapes from the past five years. But the core of the exhibition is a big group of freshly made works of art. Senior curator Justin Paton first saw them in completed form during the show's installation in Brisbane. Here he describes his encounters with a body of work 'at once beautiful, aggressive, protective and evasive.'
The East India Company man: Brigadier-General Alexander Walker
Getting to know people can take time. While preparing for a future exhibition of early portraits from the collection, I'm becoming acquainted with Alexander Walker, and finding him a rewarding subject. Painted in 1819 by the leading Scottish portraitist of his day, Sir Henry Raeburn, Walker's portrait is wrought with Raeburn's characteristic blend of painterly vigour and attentive care and conveys the impression of a well-captured likeness.
A miscellany of observable illustrations
Romantic notions of gothic leanings, the legacy of Tony Fomison, devotion to rock sub-genres and an eye to the past are familiar and sound reasons to group Tony de Lautour, Jason Greig and Bill Hammond together in one exhibition, but De Lautour / Greig / Hammond is to feature new and recent work. Could all this change? What nuances will be developed or abandoned? Will rich veins be further mined? We can only speculate and accept that even the artists concerned can't answer these questions. For the artist, every work is a new endeavour, a new beginning. What may appear to the public, the critic or the art historian as a smooth, seamless flow of images is for them an unpredictable process where the only boundaries are those that they choose to invent.
Good game, but is it art
Like any young medium, video games increasingly find themselves the subject of that age old question: is it art? Play itself has a strong presence in the artworld, from Yoko Ono's all-white chess set Play It By Trust to the amusing interactions possible with Franz West's Adaptives, but video games are often regarded with suspicion. Aren't they all just shooting and looting? And even if they're not, how can you tell if they're art?
Laying out Foundations
Looking broadly at the topic of local architectural heritage, Reconstruction: conversations on a city had been scheduled to open at the Gallery but will now instead show on outdoor exhibition panels along Worcester Boulevard from 23 June. Supplementing works from the collection with digital images from other collections, curator Ken Hall brings together an arresting art historical tour of the city and its environs.
A Warehouse in a Tutu
APRIL 2011, AND THE GALLERY was occupied by CERA, Civil Defence, the City Council and a host of other city officials tasked with the immense job of tackling the destruction that had crippled our city. We’d been occupied since 22 February, and although our immediate future was uncertain, having been through this already in September 2010 (just before staging the hugely successful Ron Mueck exhibition) most staff remained positive that we’d be able to resume normal transmission sooner rather than later. So, despite awaiting internal post-quake repairs to my home, I decided to push on and take a few weeks to sand and paint my house—an old weatherboard bungalow in New Brighton that had taken decades of battering from the predominant north-easterly wind. It was hardly dilapidated, but a spruce-up was overdue. After four days on the end of an orbital sander, two days on a ladder painting the eaves and bargeboards, a week of double coating the weatherboards and another week of sills, foundations and trims I had run out of time. And I still had to get a couple of coats of enamel on the multi-pane windows—an immense amount of brushwork that was going to keep me busy for a few weekends to come. When I got back to work, however, nothing much had changed for the better in my absence. In fact, if anything, the picture was a little murkier regarding the Gallery’s reopening, and the tall apartment buildings next door were beginning to emerge as something of an elephant in the room we all now shared. Nobody really wanted to address them; they were spoken of only in hushed tones, as if silence would make the increasingly evident problem go away. We continued to make plans for new shows even as the mutterings grew in volume, and the ramifications of a potential demolition next door began to circulate. And then suddenly project managers and insurers were involved and our worst fears began to become reality. The whole collection would have to be moved.