Notes
Artist unknown, Classical Figures

Artist unknown, Classical Figures

This article first appeared as 'Artist unknown' in The Press on 6 June 2014.

Notes
Cotton On

Cotton On

Shane Cotton: Baseland opens at 209 Tuam Street and the Ilam Campus Gallery this Saturday

Notes
Lift of a gift

Lift of a gift

Staff here at the Gallery have enjoyed finally getting the opportunity to see Dust, Smoke and Rainbows (2013), a major new painting gifted by Shane Cotton, which was brought out of storage to be photographed recently.

Notes
Slow-mo-tastic

Slow-mo-tastic

My friend's daughter visited our ArtBox show Burster Flipper Wobbler Dripper Spinner Stacker Shaker Maker (on till September 28!) on a school trip recently and was captivated by Steve Carr's Screen Shots videos, in which a paint-filled balloon bursts in super slow motion.

Collection
Kauri tree landscape

Colin McCahon Kauri tree landscape

Poet Charles Brasch described the distinctive Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland light Colin McCahon captured in his Titirangi paintings as airy and atmospheric, capable of dissolving the solid hills, forests and water into “a kind of brilliant prismatic dance”. McCahon lived in the Titirangi area between 1953 and 1959, and made numerous studies in the kauri forests of the Waitakere district, fascinated by how the sunlight streaming through the high, delicate canopy turned the kahere into a field of shimmering geometric forms. Here, the abstracted shapes of the forest rise up towards the fragmented sky, creating an effervescent play of warmth, movement and light.

kahere ~ forest

(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)

Article
Transformers

Transformers

Curator Ken Hall writes about his experience of working with artists Chris Heaphy and Sara Hughes, as part of a small team with other city council staff and Ngāi Tahu arts advisors, on the Transitional Cathedral Square artist project.

Article
The pleasure of making: objects taking centre stage in the space of the art gallery

The pleasure of making: objects taking centre stage in the space of the art gallery

Was it serendipity that the opening of Christchurch Art Gallery's Burster Flipper Wobbler Dripper Spinner Stacker Shaker Maker coincided with that of Slip Cast, a group exhibition at the Dowse Art Museum that also focused on the pleasure that artists take in manipulating materials in the process of making art?

Interview
Thieves in the attic

Thieves in the attic

An unlikely domesticity pervades the small city studio. Drawings and photographed collages are bulldogclipped and hung against the wall. Odd-shaped articles are crammed into stacks of Dole banana boxes. Large cardboard cartons, colour-coded in capital letters – 'BLACK COSTUMES'; 'RED' – are piled up near the ceiling. The props, costumes, photographs and books, the disparate resources that feed into the free-ranging eclecticism that defines the playful, performative and exhaustively explorative collaborations of Edwards + Johann, are boxed up and put away.

Today, I am told, is talking day.

My Favourite
Wayne Youle's The Saviour

Wayne Youle's The Saviour

Many months after the major February earthquake, we were told by the authorities that we were allowed to salvage whatever we could from our business – provided it fitted into a single wheelie bin.

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