Exhibitions
Events
On display
Coffee + Art
Friends
Past event
Universo Brasserie & Bar
Free (Art Bite talk only)
Join the Friends for a caffeine fix and great conversation in Universo, then enjoy a 30 minute Art Bite talk.
Related reading: Colin McCahon, Friends
Exhibition
Our Collection: 19th and 20th Century New Zealand Art
3 March 2020
Our lively new historical collection exhibitions explore Māori architecture, colonial portraiture, early landscape painting and mid-century abstraction.
Collection
Colin McCahon Canterbury Plains
Colin McCahon lived and painted in Christchurch between 1948 and 1953. During this time he completed several paintings based on the hills and plain of the Canterbury region. His painting became progressively more abstracted during 1952 and 1953. This painting is thought to have been inspired by Christchurch’s Port Hills, which were in close proximity to the McCahon family home at Barbour Street in Waltham. Arthur Prior was a lecturer and later a professor at the University of Canterbury and acquired this work from McCahon around the time it was painted. It has recently returned to Christchurch having been presented to the Gallery by the family of Arthur and his wife Mary.
(March 2018)
Commentary
Of Braided Rivers and Hydro-Traders
“With 14,000km of coastline, over 180,000km of rivers, and 3,820 lakes, there’s more to the land of the long white cloud than land…” So began an advertisement in a recent Sunday Star Times. It might have been the opening gambit for a campaign devoted to water conservation but was, in fact, a promotion for the latest model jet ski: “And all you need to unlock it is the all-new Yamaha Waverunner FX HO… SAME PLANET, DIFFERENT WORLD. Yamaha-motor.co.nz.”
Commentary
Colin McCahon: Five Years in Christchurch, 1948–53
Prior to moving to Christchurch in March 1948, Colin McCahon and his family spent a little over a year living in Muritai Street, Tahunanui, on the outskirts of Nelson city. It was his most productive period as a painter to date – a phase dominated by figurative paintings with some landscapes. The products of this prolific period were brought together in his first major one-person show, at Wellington Public Library in February 1948, organised by his Dunedin friend, Ron O’Reilly. An exhibition of forty-two works made between 1939 to 1948, more than half produced in 1947, it consisted of roughly equal numbers of landscapes (including Otago Peninsula and Maitai Valley), biblical paintings (King of the Jews, Crucifixion according to St Mark ), and non-biblical figurative works (A candle in a dark room, The Family). Although it was reviewed favourably in The Listener by J.C. Beaglehole, the subsequent letters column ran hot with controversy, and it brought McCahon to national attention.
Event
Artists at Work: EDWARDS+JOHANN
The artist collaboration EDWARDS+JOHANN will open their temporary studio at Sutton house to talk about their recent research and focus while the Artists in Residence at Sutton House for the month of May.
Event
Portrait Gallery Exhibition
Join the Friends for a talk and viewing of an exhibition, a tour of Kate Sheppard House and morning tea.
Event
Coffee + Art: May
Join the Friends for coffee and great conversation at The Thirsty Peacock, then enjoy a 30-minute Art Bite at 12pm. Bookings are not required.
Notes
How to Book Friends Tickets
To book tickets from your phone, follow these simple steps (or click here for instructions with images).
- Find the event you’d like to book for on our website www.christchurchartgallery/friends
- Scroll down until you see the Book Now option; click on the down arrow to select the date you’d like to book then click book now
- Check you are booking for the event you’d like to attend
- If you are booking for a Friends only event, you will notice the number of tickets is greyed out. To login and access Friends only tickets, click on the door image at the top of the page
- Enter your email address and password
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- Check you’re happy with your cart before you checkout
- Let us know who is attending the event
- Let us know of any special requests and tick the Terms & Conditions box then complete your sale
- Pop your payment details in then submit. And don’t forget to save your ticket to your phone for easy access on the day of the event
Don’t forget we’re here to help so get in touch if you have any problems!
friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz | 03 941 7356
Event
Friends 42nd Annual General Meeting
Please note, this date differs to the originally advertised date in March.
The 42nd AGM of the Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū will be held in the Philip Carter Family Auditorium. All are welcome to attend.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Commentary
What We Talk About With McCahon
Where to begin when writing or talking about Colin McCahon? I remember seeing one of his paintings for the first time, a North Otago landscape painted deep green with a sunless white sky on a piece of hardboard, hanging at the Forrester Gallery in Ōamaru while on a family trip when I was a young teenager. I felt like I recognised the landscape depicted from what I saw around me growing up, but I hadn’t seen it reduced to something so stark and primal before.
Commentary
Do You See?
With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.
Collection
Julia Morison Dulia
In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”
The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.
Interview
The London Club
In September 2017, Gallery director Jenny Harper, curator Felicity Milburn and Jo Blair, of the Gallery Foundation’s contracted development services, Brown Bread, went to London, taking a group of supporters who received a very special tour of the city’s art highlights. While there, they further developed the Foundation’s new London Club. Recently they sat down together in Jenny’s office…
Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
President's Letter, June 2017
The new 6pm timeslot for the Friends Speaker of the Month series is proving popular, and it has been great to see so many of you coming out to hear from our fantastic speakers.
Notes
President's Welcome
The new year started with the Friends’ fantastic summer trip, visiting exhibitions at two of Canterbury’s regional art galleries.
Notes
President's Welcome
As we approach the first anniversary of the reopening of the Gallery, it seems like a good time to celebrate a year’s progress in the life of the city.
Exhibition
From the Sun Deck: McCahon's Titirangi
Colin McCahon’s shift to Titirangi in 1953 was a watershed moment in the artist’s career, providing the inspiration for him to develop his interest in cubism and abstraction.
Commentary
To Colin McCahon
James K. Baxter’s 1952 poem ‘To Colin McCahon’ is an important marker in the long and sometimes tempestuous artistic relationship the two men shared. On an immediate level, the poem is a response to McCahon’s painting There is only one direction (1952), which he presented to Jim and Jacquie Baxter to mark the birth of their daughter Hilary after they had named McCahon her godfather.
Notes
President's Letter Summer 2015/2016
This quarter the Gallery will reopen. It has been a long time coming by anyone’s standard. Although we have maintained connections through the award-winning Outer Spaces programme and nomadic, trailed around temporary gallery spaces; being able to once more step into the Gallery’s own space is an exciting prospect. I am not alone in looking forward to having the Gallery back in its rightful setting and reacquainting ourselves with the fabulous art we collectively own.
Notes
Canterbury Landscape by Colin McCahon
In 2014 we purchased an important landscape work by Colin McCahon. Curator Peter Vangioni speaks about this new addition to Christchurch Art Gallery’s collection.
Notes
‘Where the picture stops and the world begins’
The way a work of art is framed affects our perception of the piece. A bad frame can detract and distract, a good frame enhances and even extends a work. While the Gallery has been closed we have updated frames for a number of works in the collection.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.
Notes
Kauri tree landscape by Colin McCahon
This article first appeared as 'Mighty kauris inspired McCahon' in The Press on 10 February 2015.
Notes
as there is a constant flow of light
On a recent printer's residency at the Otago University's Otakou Press Colin McCahon's huge mural painting Waterfall Theme and variations dominated proceedings.
Collection
Colin McCahon Kauri tree landscape
In 1958 poet and arts patron Charles Brasch, a great supporter of McCahon, said of the Titirangi works: 'These Auckland paintings seem an entirely new departure. The colour and light of Auckland are different from those of the rest of New Zealand; they are more atmospheric, they seem to have an independent, airy existence of their own, and they break up the uniform mass of solid bodies, hills or forests or water, into a kind of brilliant prismatic dance. Some of the paintings are explorations, evocations, of the kauri forest of the Waitakeres. In some you seem to be inside the forest, discovering the structure of individual trees, with their great shaft trunks, their balloon-like cones, and the shafts of light that play among them. In others you look at the forest from outside, as it rises like a wall before you, built up of cylinders and cubes of lighter and darker colour, with its wild jagged outlines against the sky.'
(From the Sun Deck: McCahon’s Titirangi, 17 September 2016 – 6 February 2017)
Notes
Light Passing Into a dark landscape
Today is the centennial of the death of one of New Zealand's most treasured artists, Petrus van der Velden.
Notes
There is only one direction by Colin McCahon
This article appeared as 'Divine Innovation' in the The Press on 31 August 2012.
Collection
Colin McCahon There is only one direction
This pared back, strikingly modern Madonna and child was painted in the Christchurch suburb of Phillipstown where Colin McCahon, perhaps New Zealand’s most acclaimed twentieth-century artist, lived with his family between 1948 and 1953. In contrast to the typically grander, often lavish treatment of this traditional subject within art history, McCahon’s composition is personal and startlingly bare, reduced to two naked figures framed within a rough oval that emphasises their close and enduring connection. Without haloes, thrones or attending angels, their identity is alluded to only through their grave sense of purpose and the work’s uncompromising title.
McCahon gave There is only one direction to the renowned writer James K. Baxter and his wife Jacqueline, marking the friendship between the two families and McCahon’s position as godfather to their young daughter Hilary. The painting sat above Baxter’s writing desk for many years.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Notes
As there is a constant flow of light we are born into the pure land
After many, many months in the 'Darkness' of the empty gallery, I can think of no better words than those of Colin McCahon to signify the opening of the new gallery shop at 40 Lichfield Street.
Drop in Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, 10am-4pm Weekends
See you all soon!
Notes
O'Reilly/McCahon: an Easter meditation
An Easter-themed excerpt from an article published in 2010 in The Journal of New Zealand Art History...
Notes
Sutton high-fives McCahon
Nothing made it into a W.A. Sutton painting by accident, and the white line that rises diagonally through the sky in Plantation Series II is no exception.
Exhibition
Van der Velden: Otira
This exhibition brings together a comprehensive selection of Van der Velden's paintings portraying the wild, untouched natural beauty of the Otira region's mountainous landscape.
Exhibition
Colin McCahon
Two decades after Colin McCahon's death, this touring focus exhibition brings together paintings and works on paper by one of the most widely acclaimed New Zealand artists.
Collection
Colin McCahon Blind V
The word ‘blind’ refers to a screen that cuts out light, but Colin McCahon also uses it to refer to an absence of vision. Questions of faith were important to McCahon and he often used references to blindness to suggest the inability to see the real essence and value of things. McCahon’s style was highly personal and distinctive. Blind V is part of a series of five works painted onto window blinds. The abstract forms have the feel of a beach and sky and it has been suggested that the ‘blindness’ which McCahon refers to was the inability of New Zealanders to really see and appreciate their own unique environment.
McCahon is regarded by many as New Zealand’s greatest contemporary artist. Born in Timaru, he studied art in Dunedin. He lived in Christchurch for a time, became keeper and assistant director at Auckland Art Gallery, then lecturer in painting at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, before taking up painting full time in 1970.
Collection
Colin McCahon Kauri tree landscape
In 1958 poet and arts patron Charles Brasch, a great supporter of McCahon, said of the Titirangi works: 'These Auckland paintings seem an entirely new departure. The colour and light of Auckland are different from those of the rest of New Zealand; they are more atmospheric, they seem to have an independent, airy existence of their own, and they break up the uniform mass of solid bodies, hills or forests or water, into a kind of brilliant prismatic dance. Some of the paintings are explorations, evocations, of the kauri forest of the Waitakeres. In some you seem to be inside the forest, discovering the structure of individual trees, with their great shaft trunks, their balloon-like cones, and the shafts of light that play among them. In others you look at the forest from outside, as it rises like a wall before you, built up of cylinders and cubes of lighter and darker colour, with its wild jagged outlines against the sky.' (From the Sun Deck: McCahon’s Titirangi, 17 September 2016 – 6 February 2017)
Collection
Colin McCahon Light falling through a dark landscape (A)
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
“As a painter I may often be more worried about you than you are about me and if I wasn’t concerned I’d not be doing my work properly as a painter. Painting can be a potent way of talking.
“Do you believe in the sunrise?
“My painting year happens first in late winter and early spring. I paint with the season and paint best during the long hot summers. I prefer to paint at night or more especially in the late summer afternoons when, as the light fades, tonal relationships become terrifyingly clear.
“At night I paint under a very large incandescent light bulb. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I am only now, and slowly, becoming able to paint in the morning. After a lifetime of working – farming, factories, gardening, teaching, the years at the Auckland City Art Gallery – I find it hard to paint in the world’s usual work-time. It can be difficult to accept that painting too is work.”
—Colin McCahon, 1972
Collection
Colin McCahon Northland
In 1958, Colin McCahon spent several months in America, visiting numerous art museums to see historical and contemporary art from the United States and Europe. Returning to a wintry Aotearoa New Zealand, he struggled to readjust. Eventually he found solace and inspiration in memories of a place very close to his heart – the wild, wind-sculpted landscape of Aotearoa’s Far North. Oil paintings were followed by a series of ink wash drawings, painted on paper spread out over the floor like a continuous, unfolding frieze. They are dark and lonely images, full of longing and a sense of return. “It’s a painful love, loving a land,” McCahon wrote. “It takes a long time.”
(Absence, May 2023)
Collection
Colin McCahon Red and black landscape
For the exhibition I See Red (5 December 2007 - 23 November 2008) this work was displayed with the following label: Colin McCahon’s combination of sky, sea and land is the simplest of landscapes, but by using powerful red and black, he has created a painting filled with mystery and weight.
‘Red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning, Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’ goes the old saying. This could be sunset or sunrise, a perfect day to come or a perfect storm. Which would you choose?
Collection
Colin McCahon Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is
In April 1958 Colin McCahon travelled to the US, responding both to the expansiveness of the American landscape and to the modern American painting that he saw in museums. On his return, his works increased in scale while economising in gesture: the landscape elements of Tomorrow have been reduced to a horizon and lowering sky, with the land bisected by a grey river. He converted his Titirangi garage into a studio, and built an extra bedroom for his children underneath. The studio was gloomy – there was only one small side window for light when the garage door was closed – but it precipitated dozens of new works. Tomorrow was an unfortunate painting, said McCahon, ‘in that it wouldn’t go right, and I got madder and madder. I hurled a whole lovely quart tin of black Dulux at the board and reconstructed the painting out of the mess.’ The black paint (a commercial flooring paint, mixed with sand) dripped down the surface of the work and ran between wide cracks in the studio floorboards, ruining clothes and bed linen in his sons’ room below. He finally finished the painting in May 1959.
(March 2018)