Exhibitions
Events
On display
Friends Breakfast and Private Tour: Now, Then, Next
Seraphine Pick Everything that's old is new again 2012. Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, gift of the W.A. Sutton Trust
Friends
Past event
Universo Brasserie & Bar
BOOKING IS NOW CLOSED
Join the Friends for breakfast in Universo followed by a tour of the new contemporary exhibition with head curator Lara Strongman.
In this exhibition from the collection featuring several recent acquisitions, artists offer different ways to think about time, exploring the multiple anxieties of the future or the persistence of the past in the present.
Our breakfast events are a great way to get to know fellow members and learn the background of new exhibitions in a relaxed setting before the Gallery opens to the public.
Bookings essential by Monday 17 June.
This is a Friends only event. Click here to find out more about how you can become a supporter of the Gallery and get access to special Friends events and offers.
Related reading: Friends
Exhibition
Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary
15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020
Time and the contemporary in recent works from the collection
Exhibition
We Do This
12 May 2018 – 3 June 2019
A recharged contemporary hang to mark 125 years of women’s suffrage.
Exhibition
Your Hotel Brain
13 May 2017 – 3 May 2018
Energies and anxieties from the threshold of the new millennium.
Exhibition
The Devil's Blind Spot: Recent Strategies in New Zealand Photography
19 November 2016 – 12 March 2017
Recent photography by an emerging generation of New Zealand artists.
Notes
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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
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.
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
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.
