Dutch artist Jan van der Ploeg manipulates and reorganises visual information, playing with colour, scale and repetition to create intense and eye-popping patterns. He works both with paintings and moving images, and often draws connections between the two. This untitled work is part of a larger series, ‘The Warriors’, which alludes to the professional New Zealand rugby league team. Van der Ploeg was introduced to the team by his friend, the late New Zealand artist Julian Dashper, and they attended matches together. Although van der Ploeg lives and works in Amsterdam, he has established a strong connection with New Zealand since his first visit in 1992. He regularly exhibits here, and completed a large-scale wall-painting for Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in 2008. In addition, he has undertaken research into the work of Gordon Walters and other New Zealand abstract painters.

Sophie Bannan reaches back into the cultural memory of the city beyond her lifetime, and into the experience of her grandfather, the late architect Maurice Mahoney.With his business partner Sir Miles Warren, Mahoney designed many of the modern brutalist buildings in the city, a significant number of which were lost in the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. Bannan made her shelf of fragile ceramics from clay dug from the demolition sites her grandfather’s buildings once occupied: they stand as elegies to a vanished future. Objects are lost, but memory endures.

(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)