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
Ivy Fife Royal Visit
A youthful Queen Elizabeth II became the first reigning British sovereign to visit Ōtautahi Christchurch, efficiently arriving (from Te Tai Poutini / the West Coast via Otira and Darfield) at the city railway station with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at exactly 5.45pm, Monday 18 January 1954. The moment inspired a unique response from local artist Ivy Fife, whose deft, expressive mark-making captured something of its excitement and energy. Pictured in warm evening light beneath the distant Port Hills and pitched roofs of the Gothic railway station, a somewhat chaotic scene is held together through strength of colour, composition and brushwork.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Collection
James Fitzgerald The Lighted Pillar
Christ Church Cathedral, a defining symbol of this city since its consecration in 1881, was designed by the English architect George Gilbert Scott, with input from the local supervising architect Benjamin Mountfort. In its present earthquake-damaged state it represents a significant challenge for this city’s church, civic and cultural leaders.
James Fitzgerald and the younger John Mills Thomasson were both British-born commercial artists who settled in Christchurch: Fitzgerald in 1923, after twenty years in Auckland, and Thomasson after serving in Mesopotamia (Iraq) during World War I. Both produced etchings of local Christchurch views and exhibited with the Canterbury Society of Arts.
(Above ground, 2015)
Collection
Louise Henderson Manchester Street, Christchurch
Paris-born Louise Henderson’s subtle architectural study cleverly frames a section of Manchester Street east of Cathedral Square in Ōtautahi Christchurch – a streetscape largely intact until the 2010–11 earthquakes. Her vantage point was the seven-storey New Zealand Express Company Building in Manchester Street (later known as Manchester Courts, and demolished after the earthquakes). The location of Henderson’s studio at this time is unknown, but it is tempting to speculate that this was the work she exhibited in 1933, titled View from Studio Window.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Collection
Giovanni Battista Piranesi The Drawbridge, Plate VII (second state) from the series Invenzioni Capric di Carceri
Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s The Drawbridge is one of sixteen plates from a folio of prints depicting imaginary prisons that has repeatedly haunted and inspired writers, artists and architects for over two and a half centuries. Three of Piranesi’s Carceri engravings, for example, were included in Alfred H. Barr’s exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.
First issued in 1749–50, but attracting little attention to begin with, the series was republished with heavily reworked plates in 1761, yielding darker, more detailed and more resolved prints that brought an attendant increase to their public reception and acclaim. (Above ground, 2015)
Notes
Factory at Widnes by L.S. Lowry
This article first appeared in The Press on 13 October 2004
Laurence Stephen Lowry painted Factory at Widnes in 1956, at which time he was Britain's most famous living painter. Lowry's fame increased in that year as he became the subject of a BBC television documentary, though his work had already been popular in British homes and schools as reproductions since the end of the war. If appreciation for his individualistic painting style was widespread, there was also fascination with L.S. Lowry the artist, who had projected in the press the image of a lonely recluse.