Max Gimblett
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1935
Self-Liberation by Knowing the Signs of Death
- 2010
- Pencil and ink on Arches Watercolour 555lb rough paper (France)
- The Max Gimblett and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Gift, 2011
- 762 x 1067mm
- 2011/177
Exhibition History
Related reading: Unseen: the changing collection
Notes
Max's gift
In early 2010 Max Gimblett announced his intention to give the Gallery a substantial gift of works on paper. The only complication was that someone had to go and select them...
Notes
Max's Gift
Having the opportunity to spend over a week in New York recently to work closely with the artist Max Gimblett and his studio assistants in making a selection from Max's extensive collection of works on paper for a gift to Christchurch Art Gallery rates as one of the highlights of my job as a curator.
Article
Hidden in Plain Sight
In 1997, I went to see an exhibition called White Out, curated by William McAloon for Auckland Art Gallery’s contemporary space. The show’s subtitle unambiguously promised ‘Recent Works by Seven Artists’, but as I completed my circuit I realised I’d come up one maker short.
Exhibition
Unseen: The Changing Collection
A selection of exciting recent additions to Christchurch's public art collection.
My Favourite
Peter Stichbury's NDE
Anna Worthington chooses her favourite work from the Gallery collection.
Collection
Philip Trusttum Depot
In 2009, renowned Christchurch painter Philip Trusttum surprised us with an exceptionally generous offer: a gift of twenty paintings, selected by the Gallery and with no limitation on scale or value. The first ten works entered the collection the following year, and rumbling in amongst them was Depot, this colossal gas-guzzler of a painting that hums with Trusttum’s trademark physical energy. The audacious scale belies the work’s diminutive origins; the artist found his inspiration in the toy trucks his young grandson William played with in his studio.
Collection
Don Peebles Sydney Harbour
Don Peebles travelled to Sydney in 1950, in search of a more modern art training than was available to him in Wellington. (‘Nothing much was going on in Wellington other than us being taught to draw a foot that looked like a foot,’) he said. His teacher John Passmore (1904–1984) introduced his students to early twentieth-century European modernism: Bonnard and Picasso, Cézanne and cubism. ‘That was modernism to me. That was the latest thing as far as I knew in those days.’ Passmore also encouraged his students to paint around the waterfront, a regular subject for his own work in the early 1950s. Sydney Harbour reveals Peebles moving towards the abstraction that would characterise his mature work, but not yet completely there (he made his first completely abstract work a few years later in London). A Cézanne-esque concern for planes, facets and the structure of forms is evident, even while buildings, water and distant hills remain visible.
(March 2016)
Collection
Francis Upritchard rainwob ii
The work on the three tables at the centre of this room is part of a series of sculptures artist Francis Upritchard has described as “an attempt at an unsuccessful utopia”. Like the flipped-back word in its title, it seems to set off in one direction – towards a kind of visionary, psychedelic paradise – but overturns our expectations to arrive somewhere much less certain. Locked away in intensely private reveries, the delicate, marionette-like figures that inhabit it are curiously enigmatic: part-primeval bog people, part-countercultural prophets, they live out their radiant existences somewhere between the ancient unknowable past and the distant unknowable future.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Collection
Peter Madden Crouches with moths
In classical times, a gold coin was inserted into a dead person's mouth as a ‘Charon’s obol’, a ritualistic payment for the ferry ride across the river Acheron to the underworld. With its blackened skeleton, crawling flies and shroud-like canopy of moths (cut free from the pages of National Geographic magazines), this work evokes an atmosphere of death and decay – but a closer look also reveals small signs of regeneration.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Collection
Sarah Lucas NUD CYCLADIC 1
Depending on your perspective, this curvy work by Sarah Lucas shifts between elegant Classical sensuality and in-your-face sexiness. It was inspired in part by the stylised and strangely modern female figurines of the Cycladic culture, which flourished on the islands of the central Aegean during the Early Bronze Age. Sarah made her tightly entwined sculpture from fluff-stuffed pantyhose, complete with associations of eroticism and control. It’s a cheeky invitation to consider society’s expectations about appearance, gender and sexuality.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024)
Collection
Eileen Mayo Springing Fern
English-born Eileen Mayo excelled across a remarkable range of media, including drawing, linocuts, wood engraving, lithography, tapestry and silk screening. She also became a sought-after commercial designer, known for exquisitely detailed and balanced images that appeared on stamps and coins in Australia and New Zealand. Mayo had lived in New Zealand for twenty years when she made this screenprint of young fern fronds in the lush native bush. One of her last prints, it combines an enduring appreciation of the natural world with extraordinary technical ability, conveying not only the beauty of the plants she depicts, but a sense of their place within a complex and interconnected ecosystem.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Collection
Toss Woollaston Untitled [Quentin (Kin) Woollaston Shearing]
Mountford Tosswill (Toss) Woollaston was the eldest of five sons of share-milking dairy farmers in Taranaki. His working life started divided between rural manual labour – mainly seasonal fruit and tobacco picking – and artistic pursuits, initially poetry before he found his vocation as a painter. Early study included two terms each at the Canterbury College School of Art in 1931 and the Dunedin School of Art in 1932. Woollaston held his first solo exhibition in Dunedin in 1936; his commitment to modernism at this time marked him out as singular. By the early 1960s, when he made this vigorous drawing of his youngest brother shearing, the by-then Greymouth- based artist was gaining increased recognition. In 1966 he began to work on his art full-time.
(Beneath the ranges, 18 February – 23 October 2017)
Collection
Max Gimblett Disasters of War - 2 - The Sting of the Real. The Lives of All Children Our Shame.
Collection
Max Gimblett Certainty
For the exhibition Yellow Moon: He Marama Kōwhai (28 October 2017 – 28 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
Max Gimblett is a New Zealand artist living in New York who makes art for contemplation and healing. For him, the art-making process embraces awareness of the unknown and the idea of being part of something bigger. He says: “Human is a tiny part of things. The ocean, the unconscious – these are things that are not knowable. Sometimes you can participate in a work from and in that source.” Gimblett also values “the curiosity that’s endless in beginning a drawing or a painting”, and attempts “to find a voice that will deliver the maximum content in the cleanest, clearest aesthetics”.
Collection
Max Gimblett Ocean Wheel
“The inherent mystery of painting and drawing. It not being a skill or a talent but rather an enquiry, speculation, probing the depths, searching for a way into the plane. Whatever you are thinking, in Mind, becomes a translation when flattened into the plane, there is thinking in paint, in gesture, into the plane which is unlike any other activity in life. It is mute, silent, rather like being in the sea, under the surface, and looking upwards into the sun striking low through the waters.” —Max Gimblett (Max Gimblett: Ocean Wheel 1 August – 15 November 2020)
Collection
Jeffrey Harris Grandparents at Okains
Between 1974 and 1977 Jeffrey created twenty-four extraordinary, jewel like paintings based on photographs of his relatives, marshalled together for the obligatory snapshots to mark important family occasions. In this case it’s the artist’s grandparents who are lined up before a car and buildings at Okains Bay in their Sunday best. In this series, known as Harris’s ‘Icons’, Jeffrey drew on the fifteenth-century religious paintings of Sienese artist Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo (il Sassetta). His admiration of Sassetta’s paintings can be seen in the luminous colours and spatial clarity of Grandparents at Okains.
(Jeffrey Harris: The Gift, 1 October 2022 – 12 March 2023)
Article
Brought to Light
Finally, it's finished! It is now four months since we closed the doors on the previous incarnation of Christchurch Art Gallery's collection exhibition, and the intervening period has been a very busy time for all our staff. When Christchurch Art Gallery opened in 2003, the plan, reiterated in the Paradigm Shift document of 2006, was to refresh the hang of the collection galleries after five years. Since then the display has of course not remained entirely static, and visitors will have noticed regular changes as new works entered the collection, light-sensitive works were changed and small focus exhibitions created. But Brought to Light: A New View of the Collection is something altogether more-a refreshment of our entire collection display (not just what, but why) and a re-evaluation of the physical space of the galleries themselves.
Collection
Barbara Tuck Wanton Eye
Shifting fluidly between abstraction and representation, Barbara Tuck’s intricate, interwoven paintings trace an imaginative path through real landscapes – the ancient mountains, rivers and valleys of New Zealand’s South Island. With multiple horizon-lines, oscillating viewpoints and lyrical juxtapositions, she reinvents this much-painted terrain, inviting us into a startling and enthralling dreamworld.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)