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
Collection
Frances Hodgkins River Pool, Somerset
This work belongs to a small group of related compositions from the same viewpoint, thought to have been painted by Frances Hodgkins while she stayed at The Croft, a cottage in Somerset owned by the writer Geoffrey Gorer. Completed in Hodgkins’ distinctive style, in which form and colour are blended to create an intense and lyrical impression of place, it rewards sustained viewing with a gradual unfolding of content – trees, reflective water, a model boat. Considered one of New Zealand’s greatest painters, Hodgkins pursued her practice with originality and tenacity, noting: “[I]t is so easy to paint like your master & to think other people’s thoughts, the difficulty is to be yourself, assimilate all that is helpful but keep your own individuality, as your most precious possession – it is one’s only chance.”
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Collection
Vivian Lynn 50s Models Series
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū acknowledges the significant contribution made to art, culture and political thought by artist Vivian Lynn, who died on 1 December 2018. Best known for her large-scale sculptural installations, Lynn also produced a major body of subtle yet hard-hitting works on paper (her 50s Models Series you see here is a significant example). She was one of the first New Zealand artists to address feminist issues and the lived experience of women in her work.
Lynn studied at the University of Canterbury’s art school in the late 1940s. She found it on the cusp of change, its student body increasingly interested in modern art. She said later that it was there she learned to see; most importantly, she said, her conviction that she was, and would be, an artist was upheld.
Through her long career Lynn was interested in the social and political construction of female identity. She employed many metaphors and substitutes for the female body in her work. In later life, she wrote that her practice drew on her personal experience. Rejecting the idea of a stable enduring inner self, she said she was “in favour of a corporeal, visceral, neural, erotic mind self in the world, where identity emerges, ebbs, flows and mutates from behaviour in the lived space we inhabit. No awful inner self but an epidermal self, where, as Sappho said, ‘a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh’.”
(We do this, 12 May 2018 - 26 May 2019)
Collection
Stephen Bambury Red house
Stephen Bambury has said of the titles he gives his works: “I like to put down a scent that can be followed.” In this case, that trail leads us towards the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), who in 1932 painted a work he named Red House. Malevich’s suprematism – geometric forms painted in a limited palette to represent the supremacy of ‘pure feeling’ – sought to reset the ‘givens’ of painting and perception, recognising how the relationship between two-dimensional objects on a pictorial plane could suggest movement, volume and symbolic meaning. On longer looking, the initial flatness of Bambury’s simplified house motif – which recurs frequently throughout his practice – gives way to a sense of perspectival depth, opening the image up to considerations of shelter and containment.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Speaker of the Month
Thérèse Angelo: Canterbury Cultural Collections Recovery Centre at the Air Force Museum
Notes
Christchurch Art Gallery Facade
A giant spaceship landed on a plateau
The reflection of a tornado.
An ocean of transparent glass waves
A sleeping dragon lying on the ground
An ice block kissed by the sun, beaming!
The inner can see you outside.