Exhibitions
Events
On display
Exhibition Preview: Fiona Pardington and Billy Apple
Fiona Pardington Still Life with Alatross Feathers with Pounamu and Coral Hearts, Ripiro 2013. Archival inkjet print, gesso and acrylic polymer on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite, Auckland.
Friends
Past event
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Free
Join other Friends for this special opportunity to view two major exhibitions, Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation and Great Britten! A Work by Billy Apple.
Organised by City Gallery Wellington, A Beautiful Hesitation is a major survey by one of the country's most important contemporary photographers. And in Great Britten! Billy Apple celebrates the record-shattering 1995 campaign of the Christchurch-designed Britten V1000 motorbike. Drinks and nibbles will be served.
Friends only event.
Tickets cannot be collected from venue. Please print at home.
Related reading: Pop Art, Friends, Photography, Fiona Pardington, Free event, Motor racing
Exhibition
Great Britten! A work by Billy Apple
6 November 2016
Billy Apple blurs the line between life and art with a new installation that celebrates the triumphant, record-shattering 1995 campaign of the Christchurch-designed Britten V1000 motorbike.
Event
Hawkins by Rata Lovell-Smith
Join guide volunteer guide Susan Bidwell as she discusses Rata Lovell-Smith's Hawkins in From Here on the Ground on the first floor.
Event
Taranaki by Christopher Perkins
Join curator Ken Hall as he discusses Christopher Perkins's Taranaki in From Here on the Ground on the first floor.
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
- Now that you’re signed in, you can enter the number of tickets you’d like to purchase
- 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
Sign Language Tours
Celebrate Sign Language Week and take a free guided tour of our exhibition highlights with one of our guides and a sign language interpreter.
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.
Event
Oh Baby, It's Art!
A free, guided art tour especially for parents with babies. Buggies welcome.
Event
Aotearoa Art Fair: VIP Trip
Please note, ticket sales for this trip closed on the 1st of March. If you are still interested in joining us, please email friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz.
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.
Event
Art Safari
A chance for pre-schoolers to paint, glue, print, stamp and colour without making a mess at home. Art Safari is designed for our youngest budding artists between 2-4 years old.
Event
Late Night Tour
Take a free guided tour of our exhibition highlights with one of our friendly, knowledgeable guides.
Artist Profile
Larence Shustak
Welcome to the world of Larence Shustak—a rule-breaker and image-maker who came of age in the creative cauldron that was New York City in the 1950s. He used a camera as a paintbrush, documenting as well as creatively interpreting his subjects: street people and nudes. Old folks and children. Jazz legends.
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.
Exhibition
Hidden Light: Early Canterbury and West Coast Photography
Uncovering the remarkable, largely unseen work of early New Zealand photographers.
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…
Commentary
Representing Women: Ann Shelton’s Dark Matter
What is ‘dark matter’? For theoretical physicists it is matter that cannot be directly observed but whose existence is nevertheless scientifically calculable – productively present yet simultaneously invisible. In a similar vein, the everyday phrase ‘dark matter’ describes objects, conditions and situations that harbour unease or trauma. Trauma that is often concealed, repressed, or buried. Both definitions are active in Ann Shelton’s mid-career review exhibition Dark Matter, and they provide a rich point of entry into this compelling collection of her photographic work. These are photographs that bristle with intensity and refuse to let their subjects die a quiet archival death.
Exhibition
Ann Shelton: Dark Matter
An expansive view of Ann Shelton’s tightly conceived, large scale and hyperreal photography
Commentary
Laurence Aberhart
New Zealand artist Laurence Aberhart is internationally regarded for his photographs of unpeopled landscapes and interiors. He photographs places redolent with the weight of time, which he captures with his century-old large-format camera and careful framing. But he’s always taken more spontaneous photographs of people too, particularly in the years he lived in Christchurch and Lyttelton (1975–83) when he photographed his young family, his friends and occasionally groups of strangers. ‘If I lived in a city again,’ he says, ‘I would photograph people. One of the issues is that I even find it difficult to ask people whether I can photograph a building, so to ask to photograph them – I’m very reticent. I also know that after a number of minutes of waiting for me to set cameras up and take exposure readings and so on, people can get rather annoyed. So it’s not a conscious thing, it’s more just an accident of the way I photograph.’
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.
Exhibition
Aberhart Starts Here
Iconic and unseen early photographs of Christchurch by Laurence Aberhart
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.
Artist Profile
The Devil’s Blind Spot
Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery has a long-standing tradition of curating exhibitions of emerging and early-career artists. We do this in order to contribute to the ecology of the local art world, as well as because – quite straightforwardly – we’re interested in the practices of artists at all stages of their careers, and would like to bring the work of outstanding younger artists to wider public attention. The Devil’s Blind Spot is the latest in this ongoing series, but unlike earlier exhibitions, it’s concerned with a single medium – photography.
Exhibition
The Devil's Blind Spot: Recent Strategies in New Zealand Photography
Recent photography by an emerging generation of New Zealand artists.
Commentary
The Camera as a Place of Potential
To Māori, the colour black represents Te Korekore – the realm of potential being, energy, the void, and nothingness. The notion of potential and the presence of women are what I see when I peek at Fiona Pardington’s 1997 work Moko. And I say peek deliberately, because I am quite mindful of this work – it is downright spooky. Moko is a photographic rendering of a seeping water stain upon the blackboard in Pardington’s studio, taken while she was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in Dunedin in 1997.
Exhibition
Joyce Campbell: Flightdream
Joyce Campbell’s immersive video work takes the viewer on a journey into the ocean’s fathomless depths, exploring processes of creation and annihilation.
Notes
#mygreatbritten
We’re extremely pleased to have Billy Apple’s GREAT BRITTEN! exhibition at the Gallery. A celebration of the ingenuity of the bike’s builder, John Britten, that blurs the line between life and art, it’s drawing bike lovers and art lovers alike into the Gallery in droves. And it’s pretty clear that, although not everyone is up for building a superbike in their garage, lots of you really love your wheels.
Notes
World-famous Britten superbike comes to the Gallery
The record-setting superbike that stunned the world is coming to the Gallery as part of a new exhibition by acclaimed artist Billy Apple, with a special sneak-peek event happening this Thursday 14 July.
Notes
Largest ever Fiona Pardington exhibition opens in Christchurch
Death, sex, flesh and the female gaze are among the many themes explored in the Gallery’s newest exhibition, Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation.
Commentary
The Lines That Are Left
Of landscape itself as artefact and artifice; as the ground for the inscribing hand of culture and technology; as no clean slate.
— Joanna Paul
The residential Red Zone is mostly green. After each house is demolished, contractors sweep up what is left, cover the section with a layer of soil and plant grass seed. Almost overnight, driveway, yard, porch, garage, shed and house become a little paddock; the border of plants and trees outlining it the only remaining sign that there was once a house there.
Interview
Fly Shit on the Windscreen
In February 2016, Bulletin sent graphic designer and motorbike enthusiast Luke Wood to sit down with artist Billy Apple to discuss bikes, and in particular the Britten V1000. Designed and built in Christchurch by John Britten, the V1000 is the star of Apple’s new exhibition, Great Britten! A Work by Billy Apple. The following extracts were taken from the conversation.
Exhibition
Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation
A survey exhibition by a leading New Zealand photographer explores sex, death and the female gaze.
Exhibition
Kamala, Astral and Charlotte, Lyttelton, March 1983
Laurence Aberhart's 1983 photograph of Lyttelton children is displayed on our Gloucester Street billboard.
My Favourite
Selwyn Toogood, Levin
I spent much of my adolescence in hospital, confined to bed due to a chronic illness. With a 14" TV beside me, I’d travel to imaginary places via the controller of my Nintendo games console. At the time, I couldn’t imagine walking to the letterbox, let alone experiencing the more exotic places of the world.
Event
Introduction to the Gallery Tour
Take a free guided tour of our exhibition highlights with one of our friendly, knowledgeable guides.
Exhibition
Beasts
A generous, multimedia selection of animal-themed works, both lively and thoughtful.
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
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
Petrol Heads
On a recent trip to Wellington to attend the excellent Van der Velden symposium at Te Papa I saw the Britten motorcycle on display and was instantly reminded of one exhibition that was in the pipeline here at Christchurch Art Gallery prior to the big shakes, an exhibition that involved Billy Apple and the Britten motorcycle titled Great Britten!
Article
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).
Article
New Zealand in the Biennale of Sydney and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
Article
Taryn Simon's known unknowns
In 2003, the American photographer Taryn Simon embarked upon a four-year heart-of-darkness journey. In response to paranoid rumours of WMDs and secret sites in Iraq, she turned her gaze to places and things hidden within her own country.
Exhibition
Laurence Aberhart: Nature Morte
Nature Morte is an exhibition of 105 photographs, taken between 1971 and 1989 by New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart.