What’s On
New exhibition opening soon
From Here on the Ground
The Design Store is having a revamp!
We'll be closed while we get a fresh new look. Visit us again from 14 May.
Exhibition closing soon
Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Free entry, free wifi
Collection
Glen Hayward Closed circuit
Works of art aren’t as well behaved as they used to be. Once upon a time, they stayed where they were put, hanging obediently off picture rails or perching politely on pedestals. Since the arrival of the Duchampian readymade, however, many require a second glance to distinguish them from the world around them, as everyday objects are pressed into service in new, perspective-tilting contexts. There’s another kind of work too, the type Glen Hayward is known for: the readymade’s stealthier cousin. Meticulously, even obsessively, crafted to resemble objects you wouldn’t give another glance, these unobtrusive double agents aim to blend in, adding a subversive frisson to the gallery experience.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Collection
Peter Stichbury NDE
There’s a strangely ahistorical quality to Peter Stichbury’s paintings. While his subjects are clearly contemporary personalities, the weight of the art-historical past stands behind his approach to portraiture. In this powerful image, a young woman is depicted with a thousand-yard-stare –has something has happened in the past that she has not yet come to terms with in the present?
(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)
Collection
Brenda Nightingale Untitled
In 2012, a suite of Christchurch artist Brenda Nightingale’s delicate, brooding ‘Christchurch Hills’ watercolours were reproduced in a limited edition publication, which was given away for free as part of Christchurch Art Gallery’s post-quake Outer Spaces programme. Focusing on the Port Hills that dominate the city’s southern skyline, Nightingale’s paintings subvert the picturesque conventions of the watercolour tradition; privileging, instead of idealised vistas, the often-ordinary objects that complicate our readings of them – lamp-posts, rubbish bins and walking track signs. Here, the trigonometric station at Godley Head offers an unexpected interruption to the view out across the Banks Peninsula headlands. (Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Collection
Wayne Youle The Saviour
In the weeks and months that followed the devastating earthquake on 22 February 2011, many Christchurch people looked in vain for a ‘hero on a white horse’ to lead the city out of crisis. Galloping creakily to nowhere, Wayne Youle’s riderless Saviour punctures the notion of a knight in shining armour. Instead, it emphasises his belief that this city’s salvation lies in the hands of ordinary people: all those who stayed – through choice or necessity – and contributed to the recovery in countless, unsung ways.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Notes
There is only one direction by Colin McCahon
This article appeared as 'Divine Innovation' in the The Press on 31 August 2012.
Collection
Tim J. Veling Latimer Square, Christchurch, 2012, from Adaptation, 2011 - 2012
Tim J. Veling's photographs of post-quake Christchurch are studies in memory and transformation. From a body of work titled Adaptation, this nocturnal image reveals the strangeness of the transitional city, not least its moments of surprising, eerie beauty.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
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
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)
Notes
Populate! update #8 (face up)
The waning sun and lowering weather have one nice side-effect, which is to create the perfect conditions for viewing Peter Stichbury's backlit billboard NDE, newly installed on Worcester Boulevard.