B.
Bulletin
New Zealand's leading
gallery magazine
Latest Issue
B.21701 Sep 2024
Contributors
![B.217](/media/cache/af/38/af3821525526e8c6496bc1b739fd94e1.jpg)
![Reuben Paterson A Shadow Born from Three Dreams 2008–9. Glitter and acrylic on canvas. Private collection, Christchurch. Reproduced courtesy of the artist](/media/cache/4c/dc/4cdcd5f307f399683ffd2e120c88fa9e.jpg)
Reuben Paterson A Shadow Born from Three Dreams 2008–9. Glitter and acrylic on canvas. Private collection, Christchurch. Reproduced courtesy of the artist
New Zealand in the Biennale of Sydney and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
Call it a moment of uncanny curatorial synchronicity. Call it an alignment of the trans-Tasman curatorial stars. Or-calming down a bit-call it a minor but welcome coincidence. In Sydney from 12 May till 1 August, nine New Zealand artists go on show in the Biennale of Sydney-one of the largest contingents of Kiwis ever to take part in the nearest thing the South Pacific has to European megashows like documenta and the Venice Biennale.And across roughly the same timeframe, six of those artists are on show at Christchurch Art Gallery-Jason Greig, Julia Morison, Fiona Pardington, Reuben Paterson, Rohan Wealleans, and (in the Russell Crowe position, with a foot in both Australia and New Zealand) Daniel Crooks. (The other Kiwis taking part are Yvonne Todd, Brett Graham and Shane Cotton.)
Called The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age: The 17th Biennale of Sydney, artistic director David Elliott's edition of the show sure won't be winning any prizes for economy in exhibition titling. But it's impossible not to feel hopeful for a curator who takes as his touchstone Harry Smith's great 1952 collection of field-recordings, the Anthology of American Folk Music, and who says, with a welcome directness and absence of bet-hedging, that he wants to ‘explore the affirmative power of art in the face of unprecedented threats'.
International group-shows often bring out the worst in New Zealand commentators, who feel compelled for the zillionth time to wonder what exactly makes the New Zealand work distinctively ‘ours' (Hello, you want to respond, it's from New Zealand). We're doing our best here to avoid that kind of naffness. But it has to be said that Elliott's stated interests in tricksters, cabinets of curiosity, and ‘gods and ghosts' sit very comfortably indeed with the New Zealanders in his selection-particularly those who do their digging down at the dark end of the local cultural garden, like Cotton, Greig, Pardington and Wealleans. Of course, to see how the nine New Zealand artists harmonise or otherwise with Elliott's ‘songs of survival' theme, you need to get to Sydney and get amongst it. But if you can't, or even if you can, six of the nine are playing right now at the Gallery.
Justin Paton
Senior curator
Related reading: Julia Morison, Daniel Crooks, Shane Cotton, Yvonne Todd, Jason Greig, Op + Pop, Fiona Pardington
Exhibition
Reuben Paterson: The End
Ongoing
Reuben Paterson's sparkling elevator installation offers an unexpected space for contemplation and connection.
My Favourite
![Shane Cotton's Takarangi](/media/cache/c1/9a/c19a50158f793fe1dcf4faa37508c828.jpg)
Shane Cotton's Takarangi
I grew up in the Motueka Valley at a place called Ngatimoti. The Peninsula Bridge crosses the Motueka river there. It carries one lane on a timber deck joining SH 61 to Peninsula Road and the west bank of the river. The bridge is 110 years old, still doing its job of daring every kid who grows up in its vicinity to climb the railing and take the leap one day – maybe thirty feet if the summer is hot and the river sedate and inviting. By the time I’m sixteen, I’m a veteran. Veterans don’t jump. We dive, head first, eyes open, arms outstretched. There must be grace in the art of falling.
Exhibition
Sydow: Tomorrow Never Knows
1960s London set the scene for Carl Sydow’s playful, op-inspired sculptures.
Exhibition
Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation
A survey exhibition by a leading New Zealand photographer explores sex, death and the female gaze.
Collection
![Black on white](/media/cache/e4/30/e430d0466febef2350622bce546bf763.jpg)
Gordon Walters Black on white
Gordon Walters is best-known for work that fused the influence of European modernist art and Māori and Pacific art forms, particularly the koru motif of painted kōwhaiwhai rafter designs. Walters’ influences from European modernism included the hard-edged geometric abstractions of Victor Vasarely and Auguste Herbin, seen while in Europe in 1950–51. Walters made his first optically charged ‘koru paintings’ in 1956, but didn’t show them until 1966 when he first exhibited this painting in Auckland.
Walters’ adaptation of the koru has been both admired and criticised by cultural commentators. Walters himself, when discussing the motif, increasingly focused on the fine mechanics of abstraction:
'What I’ve done to the form is push it more in the direction of geometry. So that I can have in my painting not only a positive/negative effect of black and white, but I can also have a working of vertical and horizontal, which is equally important.' (Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)
Article
![Stakes in the ground](/media/cache/01/43/0143cc69b3a0ab0b0adfc332554a0f74.jpg)
Stakes in the ground
Last, Loneliest, Loveliest is New Zealand's first official presence at the International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, and takes its alliterative title from Rudyard Kipling's poem, 'The Song of the Cities', which gives four lines each to various cities from the British Empire, including Auckland:
Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart–
On us, on us the unswerving season smiles,
Who wonder 'mid our fern why men depart
To seek the Happy Isles!
Article
![The pleasure of making: objects taking centre stage in the space of the art gallery](/media/cache/4a/73/4a73dad903a23b408b31eb707c2d1457.jpg)
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?
Article
![Seeking stillness in movement](/media/cache/5e/ff/5eff3ce38d02ff4df647425696f4677a.jpg)
Seeking stillness in movement
Time didn't feel like it was on my side on the day I first saw Daniel Crooks's film Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement) (2009–10). In Sydney for just a couple of days to see the Biennale, I'd committed the cardinal mistake of the international art tourist and bitten off more culture than I had time to chew. By the time I reached Cockatoo Island and its dozens of exhibits, I was suffering from what might be called the Grumpiness of the Long-Distance Art Watcher – a state in which one doesn't absorb the artworks so much as check them off, feeling simultaneously fretful about my dwindling time and resentful about the sheer quantity of art. Though I hardly knew it then, this was the perfect state in which to test Crooks's video – a work that attempts, like no other I know, to induce an altered sense of time.
Article
![Yvonne Todd: The Wall of Man](/media/cache/67/98/6798bc60dca823e492b7dce5f5dab2de.jpg)
Yvonne Todd: The Wall of Man
A succinct ad placed in the classifieds of the North Shore Times in March 2009 attracted some forty applicants. Respondents were shown a photographic portrait of an unnamed executive, and directed towards ervon.com – artist Yvonne Todd's website – to decide whether or not they wanted to be photographed. Some still did. The unfolding story might not have been exactly what they'd expected, but all who agreed understood it would be something different. Next came the eliminations: sixteen men were chosen to be photographed; twelve made it to the final cut. The resulting images were printed at varying sizes and titled: International Sales Director, Retired Urologist, Family Doctor, Senior Executive, Hospital Director, Company Founder, Sales Executive, Chief Financial Officer, Image Consultant, Independent Manufacturing Director, Publisher, Agrichemical Spokesman. This is The Wall of Man.
Notes
![To the memory of Julian Dashper](/media/cache/9e/b9/9eb9285a44b1b8d31c3cb1a86bfe5f80.jpg)
To the memory of Julian Dashper
One of the highlights for staff over the eight or so years that the Christchurch Art Gallery was open prior to the shakes was the opportunity to work alongside Julian Dashper on his exhibition To The Unknown New Zealander.
Notes
![Untitled 1956 by Gordon Walters](/media/cache/20/24/202443dfbe666d066ae38aaebebaaa06.jpg)
Untitled 1956 by Gordon Walters
This article first appeared as 'Balancing act' in The Press on 17 August 2012.
Notes
![Glittering](/media/cache/02/38/0238c225682614bbb71e8f62c3714ab1.jpg)
Glittering
When it comes to posting comprehensive pictures of your new exhibitions online, opinion is divided.
Article
![Speaking sticks and moving targets](/media/cache/81/41/81413aa31a90cc3aba6bb82b7f3f8792.jpg)
Speaking sticks and moving targets
New works by Shane Cotton
The Hanging Sky brings together Shane Cotton's skyscapes from the past five years. But the core of the exhibition is a big group of freshly made works of art. Senior curator Justin Paton first saw them in completed form during the show's installation in Brisbane. Here he describes his encounters with a body of work 'at once beautiful, aggressive, protective and evasive.'
Interview
![Shane Cotton](/media/cache/49/74/4974282d62b1d56d260cd1670e67bc9e.jpg)
Shane Cotton
Back on 20 September 2011, when our public programmes team began setting up the Hagley Park Geo Dome for a talk with Shane Cotton, they put out about sixty chairs and would have been glad to fill them. After all, it was a cold night in Christchurch, the roads were rough, the Geo Dome was off the beaten track and the quake had long since broken the rhythm of the Gallery's old Wednesday night programme of public talks.
Article
![A miscellany of observable illustrations](/media/cache/0a/f2/0af25e4dd05d5f224a3932efaee67f36.jpg)
A miscellany of observable illustrations
Romantic notions of gothic leanings, the legacy of Tony Fomison, devotion to rock sub-genres and an eye to the past are familiar and sound reasons to group Tony de Lautour, Jason Greig and Bill Hammond together in one exhibition, but De Lautour / Greig / Hammond is to feature new and recent work. Could all this change? What nuances will be developed or abandoned? Will rich veins be further mined? We can only speculate and accept that even the artists concerned can't answer these questions. For the artist, every work is a new endeavour, a new beginning. What may appear to the public, the critic or the art historian as a smooth, seamless flow of images is for them an unpredictable process where the only boundaries are those that they choose to invent.
Notes
![Selected proofs](/media/cache/3e/fb/3efb9d723929a66403906d868599b35b.jpg)
Selected proofs
Peter Trevelyan's exhibition Selected Proofs is currently on at the University of Canterbury's SOFA Gallery until 7th September.
Article
![A Tale of Two Chiefs](/media/cache/93/2c/932c206d44cf36b15201f7b79ea1c289.jpg)
A Tale of Two Chiefs
If you have recently visited He Taonga Rangatira: Noble Treasures at the Gallery you will have been struck by Fiona Pardington's two large photographic portraits of lifelike busts of Ngāi tahu tipuna (ancestors).
Collection
![Celeste](/media/cache/50/b8/50b824b14b9af7e0917de4f21e1db1f7.jpg)
Bill Culbert Celeste
Bill Culbert’s high school art teacher asked his students to stand in a dark room, then went outside. The sunlight streamed through the keyhole, projecting a tiny image of him – upside down and waving – on the room’s far wall. From that moment, Culbert was excited by light’s power to transform how we see the world. These sculptures were some of the first he made exploring the possibilities of electric light. In Celeste, he placed a lightbulb into a dark box full of tiny holes, then put that inside a bigger Perspex box so that it generates multiple ‘ghost’ bulbs on the outside. Reflection 1 tests the line between reality and illusion, as another bulb repeats itself into infinity. Culbert liked ordinary, everyday materials best, believing they left more room for the imagination.
(Wheriko - Brilliant! 17 May 2019 – 16 February 2020)
Collection
![Whiteout](/media/cache/27/6a/276ac68f961788cdef4b79d25eb1902d.jpg)
Neil Dawson Whiteout
Neil Dawson’s sculptures consistently explore the slippage between appearance and reality. We think we see solid forms, but on closer inspection they turn out to be illusions.
Whiteout conveys Dawson’s fascination with these ideas and playfully challenges our perceptions of space and movement. This wall sculpture is reminiscent of the early structures of the Dadaists and Russian Constructivist sculptors Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) and Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962) in the early 20th century. Dawson is one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary site-specific artists. His innovative use of sculptural materials and principles of perspective are evident in this early example of his work.
Born in Christchurch, Dawson studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Melbourne. He has exhibited widely and has several major public installations in New Zealand and internationally.
Collection
![Energy Triad](/media/cache/1d/f3/1df3f2f1253e158f379eb13f30ead281.jpg)
Don Driver Energy Triad
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
The New Plymouth-based Don Driver worked from the mid-1970s until the 1990s on sculptural assemblages made from found materials. Echoing the work of American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose work Driver had experienced while visiting New York in 1965, Energy Triad makes assertive use of familiar, locally sourced items, placing pioneering farming tools alongside advertising and road signage, all with a meticulous eye to formal balance and arrangement.
Collection
![Mang](/media/cache/7f/f5/7ff5a8213caac4a931cdc6dcc23c4cb3.jpg)
Mark Braunias Mang
Mark Braunias has applied a kind of speculative genetic engineering to the work of Walt Disney, Andy Warhol and the surrealist Jean Arp, resulting in giant, amoeba-like versions of comic-book characters that appear ready to spring to life. A master of reassemblage and reinvention, Braunias makes his ‘quick draw’ from a vast cache of popular cultural and historical sources, while applying a quiet dose of wry intent. (Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)
Collection
![Untitled](/media/cache/65/f7/65f7f59b7d5e91e34d1c9a2745a3b20f.jpg)
Julian Dashper Untitled
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
The repurposed drumskin became a signature motif for Auckland-based Julian Dashper, whose conceptual art practice saw him develop an international exhibiting profile in the United States, Australia and Europe, before his untimely death in 2009.
Resonating with the American pop artist Jasper Johns’ 1950s target paintings, Dashper’s drumskin canvases were also made to honour a band of New Zealand’s pioneering modernists. In 1992 The Big Bang Theory saw him assembling full drumkits emblazoned with his heroes’ names: The Anguses, The Hoteres, The Colin McCahons, The Woollastons and The Drivers.
Collection
![June Pause](/media/cache/06/6c/066c14cdf6e8ec70b9122a5580db1555.jpg)
Simon Morris June Pause
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
Packed with an energetic sense of movement, Simon Morris’s painting gives the effect of a boldly rhythmic musical score. Its pattern, appearing at first to be random or chaotic, is found to be sequenced and repeating, and with diagonals regularly breaking up the picture plane.
Morris builds on the legacy of pioneering New Zealand geometric abstractionists such as Carl Sydow and Gordon Walters. This optical sequence was generated by a mathematical formula, which he says “creates images that I wouldn’t come up with myself. It’s like the system partly makes the work.”
Collection
![Naturist](/media/cache/b5/9e/b59e870685883f6caa34458655e2b35d.jpg)
Reuben Paterson Naturist
In Naturist Reuben Paterson revels in geometric patterns and sharp contrasts between black and white, reminiscent of 1960s hard-edged abstraction, op-art and Maori designs. The delicate, illusory effect Naturist has on the viewer is heightened by Paterson’s use of glitter, a recurring feature in his work.
Naturist draws on an installation at Riccarton House in 2004 where the artist created a black and white optical illusion of the landscape. Tapping into invisible, undulating energies left behind by Maori, Naturist is a study of how collective energies from the past are reflected in the land.
Paterson graduated from the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, in 1997. In the same year he was selected as one of three recipients of the Moet & Chandon Fellowship, awarding him a six-week residency in France.
Collection
![Slumper](/media/cache/11/54/1154c41344cad298b8fc321ff84ea84b.jpg)
Miranda Parkes Slumper
Revelling in a kind of contemporary baroque, Miranda Parkes’ Slumper began as a three by nine metre piece of flat canvas, but – being too large for the studio floor – had to be folded into thirds before being painted and scrunched into this form. Having grappled with the problem of creating more objects in a world already filled with objects, Parkes negotiated a kind of truce with this dilemma, flipping it around and using spectacular excess as a potentially useful ingredient. While retaining an honest, at times iconoclastic stance, she is nevertheless drawn to the sensory aspects of canvas, colour and paint; elaborate costume, circus tents and over-the-top, opulent interiors are occasionally grist to her painter’s mill.
(As Time Unfolds, 5 December 2020 – 7 March 2021)
Collection
![Tootoo](/media/cache/28/de/28dec36db7bcd9d00aad75c1dcf159b1.jpg)
Julia Morison Tootoo
Julia Morison’s Tootoo was created as part of a brim-full series of multi-panelled paintings called Gargantua’s Petticoat. The series is an array of riotous provocation, full of abstracted sensual forms that allude to corsetry and piercings, petticoats and hula hoops, bed springs and bandages. Julia was painting lecturer at the University of Canterbury from 1999–2007. This followed eight years living in France, an originally unanticipated outcome of being awarded the one-year Moët et Chandon Fellowship artist residency in 1990.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
![Te Pūtahitanga ō Rehua](/media/cache/3c/4c/3c4c0b5edabd05d6289eb5ebbd7ad623.jpg)
Reuben Paterson Te Pūtahitanga ō Rehua
As a young boy, Reuben Paterson used to play with the sparkling black sand on Piha beach; now as an artist he often uses glitter in his works. In this one, he took inspiration from Māori mythology connected with water, cleansing, transformation and stars. Pūtahitanga can mean constellation. Rehua was a son of Rangi-nui (the sky father) and Papa-tū-ā-nuku (the earth mother), and is associated in Tūhoe legend with the star Antares. To make this dazzling kaleidoscopic landscape, Paterson digitally layered and rearranged his own drawings. He likens the shifting black and white patterns to the restless energies and histories that have unfolded on the whenua (land) of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their optical push-and-pull highlights that what can be seen depends on who is doing the looking. What catches your eye?
(Wheriko - Brilliant! 17 May 2019 – 16 February 2020)
Collection
![Elongated Triangles 4](/media/cache/ef/75/ef753d657761ffe09209f475a650c555.jpg)
Bridget Riley Elongated Triangles 4
This screenprint by English artist Bridget Riley presents a compressed, iridescent concertina of aqua green bands, wedged between tapering lines of orange and candy pink. Bridget’s major international debut was in The Responsive Eye, an exhibition held in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she showed two large, powerfully optical works in black-and-white and grey. She began creating related sharp-edged optical works in pure colour two years later.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
![Drawing 3, III](/media/cache/17/db/17db823e5277b6846ab952c92f0e560b.jpg)
Carl Sydow Drawing 3, III
Carl Sydow was part of an exciting new generation of contemporary sculptors inspired by the use of non-traditional industrial materials during the 1970s. As well as sculpture, Sydow also produced an extraordinary series of drawings using the then-new printing industry standard for graphic designers, Letraset. Sydow used different Letratone patterns, which he cut out and stuck on to paper, often overlapping, to create a series of abstract optical patterns. In these drawings the pencil was replaced with a scalpel, and his unconventional use of material makes them seem more like constructions than drawings in the traditional sense.
(Die Cuts and Derivations, 11 March – 2 July 2023)
Collection
![Drawing 6: V](/media/cache/98/a6/98a6a4c79901ee006c522db860f400f0.jpg)
Carl Sydow Drawing 6: V
Carl Sydow has used these 20 cubes, each tilted onto one edge, to explore form, surface texture and the presence of objects within space. Taken individually, each object is distinct, as the 'light' falls in a different way on every surface, but together they form an engaging abstract pattern. Sydow created the work with a combination of precise ink drawing and the use of letrafilm, a system of ready-made transfers. The effect creates the illusion that the work is three-dimensional. Sydow's formal investigation of abstract properties such as colour, line, tone, volume and movement reflect the influence of Constructivism on his work. Born in Takapau, in the central Hawkes Bay, Sydow studied at the Schools of Fine Arts at both the University of Canterbury and Auckland University. After graduating, he went to the Royal College of Art, London, on an Arts Council grant from 1964 to 1966. Sydow regularly exhibited with The Group in Christchurch and was a founding member of the Sculptors’ Group, formed in 1970.
Collection
![Untitled](/media/cache/f2/53/f2533e321dfe681df84016ed248eadd7.jpg)
Gordon Walters Untitled
New Zealand painter Gordon Walters started making his optically charged paintings in 1956, four years before the British painter Bridget Riley, op art’s principal exponent, began working with similar ideas. Walters’ explorations owed much to his study of Māori and Papua New Guinean art and their positive/ negative treatment of space, and to the abstract modernist painting he had seen while in Europe in 1950–51. Although best-known for his koru (fern bud motif ) paintings, his later, more simplified works remained equally visually challenging.
(Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)
Collection
![Untitled](/media/cache/b1/ca/b1caa108627d9768ef536fd1c3cb7ad8.jpg)
Gordon Walters Untitled
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
“I like the rigorous quality of geometric abstract painting. I like the clarity of idea. I like the means used. I like the severity and the rigour of it. I don’t think this is a limitation. I think this is something which frees you to all kinds of investigation. It opens up all kinds of possibilities.”
—Gordon Walters, 1975
Collection
![Mao Tse-Tung](/media/cache/dd/61/dd618d0af01a02fc9859bc42c98c2543.jpg)
Andy Warhol Mao Tse-Tung
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
Closely associated with notions of fame and popular culture, Andy Warhol was a leading name in American pop art, and renowned for using the aesthetics of advertising and commercial printing techniques in his work.
Warhol’s screenprint of Mao Tse-Tung was made when communist China’s founder was still alive. It adapted a portrait that was used throughout China in veneration of its leader and his ideas. The blue-faced Chairman Mao is one of a series of colour variations Warhol created, all equally startling. He made similar portraits of American icons including Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse.
Collection
![Chromatic Variations IX](/media/cache/2b/ed/2bed56e0006730f8c991e1692769e270.jpg)
Mervyn Williams Chromatic Variations IX
This work is one a series of screenprints, the name of which reflects Mervyn Williams’ love of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music and also refers to variations in colour. He has said that Chromatic Variations IX can be looked at as if it was a Tibetan mandala, rather than simply being a design. Williams’ painting and printing have always centred on formal abstraction. In the Chromatic Variations series he abstracted forms in a complex manner and experimented with different colours in each print. Williams was born in Whakatane in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. In 1956 he met artist Ted Dutch (b. 1928) who got him interested in silk-screen work. Williams studied at Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland. He won First Prize in the Graphic Section of the Hay’s Art Award in 1966 and was represented in the ‘International Biennale Exhibition of Graphic Art’ in Tokyo in 1966 and 1972. Williams also won the New Zealand Print Council Samarkand Award in 1969.
Collection
Roy Lichtenstein Flowers
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
Roy Lichtenstein’s Flowers is art about art; a parody both of cubism and of the long-established still life genre. Lichtenstein was a leading figure in
the American pop art movement from the 1960s. He began making still lifes in 1972, riffing off artists such as Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian while applying his adaptation of graphic comic book style and commercial printing techniques.
Flowers exists in multiple versions. The screenprint (and a Christmas card) followed a much larger work in paper collage, tape and marker on card.