Exhibitions
Events
On display
Friends Floortalk: chicken / man by Ron Mueck
Ron Mueck chicken / man 2019. Mixed media. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2019 by Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation with assistance from Catherine and David Boyer, Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Charlotte and Marcel Gray, Ben Gough Family Foundation, Jenny and Andrew Smith, Gabrielle Tasman and Ken Lawn, Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation’s London Club along with 514 other generous individuals and companies. Courtesy Anthony d’Offay, London
Friends
Past event
Meet at the front desk
Free / Friends only event
Join the Friends for a special floortalk with director Blair Jackson, head curator Lara Strongman and registrar Gina Irish. Hear them talk about the work, especially created for Christchurch by Ron Mueck, and its journey here from the Isle of Wight.
This is your chance to ask all your questions about
chicken / man.
RSVP by Monday, 20 May.
Please let us know if you are attending by filling out a short form here or by emailing friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz.
This is a Friends only event. Click here to find out more about becoming a Friend and to get access to special Friends-only events.
Related reading: Talk, Friends, Ron Mueck
Exhibition
Ron Mueck
2 October 2010 – 23 January 2011
Astounding in their realism and emotional power, Ron Mueck's works have made him one of the most renowned sculptors of our time. See them exclusively at Christchurch Art Gallery from 2 October.
Collection
Ron Mueck chicken / man
Ron Mueck is an internationally renowned, UK-based Australian sculptor who makes astonishingly life-like sculptures of people. Rarely life-sized, they are typically realised at either a vast or reduced scale, and caught in moments that are both everyday and puzzling. Here amidst a selection of mainly historical realist paintings, Mueck’s compelling chicken / man might seem an unlikely inclusion. But like these other works, it echoes common human experience, respecting human vulnerability and the weight of memory and loss.Along with thematic and emotional resonances, it also recalls the archetype of artist and muse – Mueck finding expressive potential in another person’s meticulously observed human frame. Meanwhile across the kitchen table, bird and man face each other intently.
(Persistent encounters, March 2020)
film
Still Life: Ron Mueck at Work
A behind-the-scenes look at the meticulous skill with which artist Ron Mueck created chicken / man.
Notes
How to Book Friends Tickets
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Don’t forget we’re here to help so get in touch if you have any problems!
friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz | 03 941 7356
Notes
Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation's Fifth Annual Gala Dinner
London's hottest chefs are coming to town – and you're invited to dinner!
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.
Artist Profile
Studio Visit
I was in London last October and keen to visit Ron Mueck, but he wasn’t there: he’d gone down to Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, where he has a studio. I spent my childhood in England, but I’d never been to the Isle of Wight. It’s in the English Channel; a Victorian retreat beloved by Tennyson, who wrote ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ here. It was also the home of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who made portraits of many of Tennyson’s guests. (When Tennyson took the American poet Longfellow to Cameron’s house for a portrait, he reportedly warned: “You’ll have to do whatever she tells you. I’ll come back soon and see what’s left of you.”)
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.
Director's Foreword
Director's Foreword
As I write this, I’m still smiling with pleasure and pride at the huge success of the Gallery Foundation’s fundraising drive for our own work by Ron Mueck. Wonderful in its own right, it’s amazing to finish the 2017 calendar year knowing a sculpture by Mueck is now on its way to join the other four ‘great works’ for Christchurch.
Article
Confonting Portraiture
When it comes to creative encounters, there can be few that match the first sighting of a Ron Mueck sculpture. As with other landmark events, I suggest you are unlikely to forget exactly where you were when that formative experience took place.