Exhibitions
Events
On display
Margaux Warne
Cassandra Austen Jane Austen circa 1810. Pencil and watercolour. 114 mm x 80 mm. Collection of National Portrait Gallery, London. Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries, 1948.
Image credit: National Portray Gallery, London, Cassandra Austen CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Available at https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw00230/Jane-Austen
Patrick Branwell Brontë The Brontë Sisters (Anne Brontë; Emily Brontë; Charlotte Brontë) circa 1834. Pencil and watercolour. 902 mm x 746 mm. Collection of National Portrait Gallery, London. Purchased, 1914.
Image credit: National Portray Gallery, London, Patrick Branwell Brontë CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Available at https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw00797/The-Bront-Sisters-Anne-Bront-Emily-Bront-Charlotte-Bront
Friends
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
$5 Friends, $10 non-members, students with ID free
Art historian Margaux Warne brings together her interests in nineteenth-century English art and literature by examining portraits of some of her favourite writers, including Jane Austen and the Brontës.
Warne will uncover the fascinating stories behind these portraits, while discussing the writers' relationships to the visual arts.
Margaux Warne studied Art History at the University of Canterbury and has presented two lectures at Christchurch Art Gallery in 2017. She has recently returned to Christchurch after living in London and Paris.
This event is open to Friends and non-members.
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Related reading: Friends
Exhibition
New Dawn Fades
10 November 2018 – 23 February 2020
A selection of the Gallery’s most-treasured historical European artworks.
Exhibition
Hidden Light: Early Canterbury and West Coast Photography
2 February – 25 August 2019
Uncovering the remarkable, largely unseen work of early New Zealand photographers.
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.
