Exhibitions
Events
On display
Friends Breakfast and Private Tour of Te Wheke
Robin White and Ruha Fifita We are the Small Axe 2015. Natural dyes and pigments on barkcloth. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2019
Friends
Universo Brasserie & Bar
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED
Join the Friends for breakfast in Universo followed by a tour of the new exhibition Te Wheke by Gallery curators.
Booking essential by Monday 13 April. This is a Friends-only event.
Related reading: Friends, Te Wheke
Exhibition
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
Experience the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean.
Collection
Pip Culbert Pup Tent
The tent, one of the most basic architectural structures, is also a symbol for temporary shelter and a metaphor for the body. Pip Culbert has investigated its essential form by removing everything but the reinforced stitching, laying out its structure like an isometric plan. The tent is denied perspective but retains a spatial sense.
Culbert was a British artist based in France who graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1960s. Culbert showed her work extensively in solo and group shows internationally, and first exhibited in this country in 1993.
Christchurch Art Gallery acknowledges with sadness the recent passing of Pip Culbert.
(Above ground, 2015)
Collection
Gretchen Albrecht Banded Orange
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
“Abstraction or non-figuration is very liberating in that you’re able to speak about anything without the problem of depicting figurative images that kind of pin you down. “I can roam freely in all directions and gather the layers that I need into the painting so that the content is revealed in all these many different layers that come into it through colour and movement and shape and rhythm and all the tools of the painter.”
—Gretchen Albrecht, 2006
On her colour-field series: “They are very considered paintings, but my handling of paint allows for a seemingly spontaneous feel to them. Of course, it is, in a way, totally spontaneous because I rarely go to the newly stretched up canvas with a pre-determined idea in my head. […] The gestural physicality of my process means I can let everything grow organically as the painting dictates where it wants to go.”
—Gretchen Albrecht, 2015
Notes
Te Wheke celebrates Ōtautahi Christchurch’s place in the Pacific
An immersive exhibition that explores art through our connections with the Pacific will be unveiled at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in April.
Event
Fatu Feu'u in Te Wheke
Join Samoan artist Fatu Feu'u in Te Wheke, where he will be talking about his works in the exhibition, and about his practice in general.
Event
Te Wheke Curators
Join our gallery curatorial team for a massed floor-talk in Te Wheke, a new exhibition that explores works from our collection - with significant loans - and opens narratives of navigation, migration, identity and place in the Pacific.
Event
Friends Speaker of the Month: Precious and Personal
An intimate look at favourite works from the personal collections of Friends of the Art Gallery.
Director's Foreword
Director’s Foreword
Welcome to the autumn issue of Bulletin. Here at the Gallery, we’re about to move into a major changeover as we rehang our upstairs collection galleries. When they reopen again on 10 April, the whole space will have been given over to a major new exhibition.
Event
Te Wheke Fun Day
Celebrate the opening of the Te Wheke exhibition with performances, storytelling, and Pasifika-inspired making workshops for the whole family.
Event
The Pātaka Cabinet
Colonial furniture expert and furniture restorer William Cottrell, and Dan Smith, curator at Akaroa Museum, will discuss the conservation and restoration of the intricately-carved William Henry Menzies Stanford family pātaka cabinet (c.1985), a recent Gallery acquisition and star of the Te Wheke exhibition.
Event
Andrew Paul Wood on Fiona Pardington's Tiki: Orphans of Māoriland
Art historian and writer Andrew Paul Wood gives a talk on the inception of Fiona Pardington’s Tiki: Orphans of Maoriland, the mystery of what the tiki are and where they came from in the context of the early colonial period, and what they might mean in Pardington’s work.
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.
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.