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From Here on the Ground
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Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa
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Notes
When is a dog a mouse?
Throughout the centuries man has delighted in creating representations of his canine companions.
Collection
Bill Hammond Living Large 6
There’s no big break. It’s just a slow game. —Bill Hammond, 2002
Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums (3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020)
Exhibition
Menagerie: Animals from the Gallery's Permanent Collections
Menagerie brings together 17 historical and contemporary paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture from the Gallery's Permanent Collections, all of which feature an animal of some description, from cats, dogs and birds to horses, bulls, fish and even a hippopotamus!
Collection
Duncan Grant Collie Dog
Collie Dog is from a set titled ‘Six Lithographs’, a collaboration between Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, with each artist contributing three works. Grant’s three lithographs also included Hawk and The Cat and were produced at Miller’s Press. Grant was an active printmaker throughout most of his career, producing prints alongside his activity as a painter, designer, potter and decorator. He is a major figure in 20th century British art and was a central member of the Bloomsbury Group. He was also closely associated with the Omega Workshops which operated in London between 1913 and 1919.
Collection
William Hogarth The Bruiser, C. Churchill (once the Revd), in the Character of a Russian Hercules, Regaling himself after having Kill’d the Monster Caricatura that so Sorely Gall’d his Virtuous friend, the Heaven born Wilkes
Here’s some beastly behaviour: William Hogarth, a famous eighteenth-century British artist, trading insults with two gentlemen whom he had greatly upset. Hogarth had published an engraving attacking the journalist Charles Churchill and the politician John Wilkes, and another showing Wilkes being tried in court. Churchill, in return, published a vicious poem about Hogarth. He retaliated by making this print, picturing Churchill as a drunken bear, clutching a beer tankard and a club covered in ‘lyes’. The picture in the lower right-hand corner shows Hogarth whipping Churchill and Wilkes (as a performing bear and monkey) into line. Meanwhile, Hogarth’s pug passes judgement on Churchill’s poem.
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
Betty Harrison Persimmon (Study of a Racehorse)
Nora Elizabeth (Betty) Harrison grew up in rural Canterbury, where she developed a passion for horses. She brought her knowledge of horses to creating this plaster sculpture, painted to resemble bronze. It is believed to have been modelled after a photograph of a famous stud racehorse owned by King Edward VII.
Harrison was at the Canterbury College School of Art when she made this work. A top student there in the 1920s while in her teenage years, she studied there until 1930 and then went into nursing. Tragically, she caught tuberculosis from a patient and died aged just twenty-five.
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
Michael Parekowhai My Sister, My Self
Michael Parekowhai’s My Sister, My Self recalls a once-common sight in suburban New Zealand front gardens: the concrete seal with a chrome ball on its nose, a home-grown version of the performing circus seal. Connecting to other histories, it also recalls the kekeno, the New Zealand fur seal, which had an unfortunate central role in our pre-colonial past.
At the pinnacle of this spectacular balancing act is a replica of the artist Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1913 Bicycle Wheel – a bicycle wheel upside down on a wooden stool. Duchamp made it for his own pleasure – he liked spinning the wheel in his studio – and later described it as his first ‘readymade’.
(Beasts)
Collection
Francis Upritchard Husband
Francis Upritchard’s baboon-ish Husband and Wife are like animals from an imaginary zoo, though their expressions may have been borrowed from the human visitors who come to stare at the beasts. Husband, absorbed with his own cleverness, does not mind such attention; Wife seems less comfortable, cringing under the viewers’ gaze.
Based in London, Upritchard is a sculpture graduate (1998) from the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts. Since her first exhibition in London in 2000, she has shown in many different parts of the world.
(Beasts, 2015)