Exhibitions
Events
On display
Friends' private Gallery viewing
Friends
Past event
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery. Join us on Monday 21 December from 5.30pm-7.00pm for a private viewing of the reopening exhibition and a glass of Christmas cheer.
Following the Gallery’s opening to the public on Saturday 19 December (10am till 10pm), come and join fellow Friends on Monday 21 December after the Gallery closes. Enjoy a glass of wine with us before exploring the galleries. Simply show your membership card for entry.
Plus we have an exclusive Friends offer. The Friends commissioned Canterbury artist Wayne Youle to make a limited edition of bespoke badges for new Friends joining the Gallery over the Summer of Art.
We're offering current Friends the opportunity to purchase one of these badges for $10. Every badge is different, so come along and choose your favourite on Monday. Please show your membership card when you buy your badge. And remember, stocks are limited, so grab one while they last.
Related reading: Wayne Youle, Friends
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
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.
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.
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.
Artist Profile
Wayne Youle: Look Mum No Hands
He’s been called a cultural prankster, an agent provocateur and a bullshit artist (that last description came from his dad, but it was bestowed – he’s pretty sure – with love). While we’re at it, add ‘serial pun merchant’ to that list; in art, as in conversation, Wayne Youle can spot a good one-liner a mile off and has never knowingly left an entendre undoubled.
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
The House of Wellbeing
On Saturday, I spoke at the launch of a major new work of art in public space—Wayne Youle's installation The House of Wellbeing ALL WELCOME, at the CPIT Aoraki campus on Madras Street.
Collection
Wayne Youle ALONE TIME
An obsessively ordered, subversively witty re-imagining of Wayne Youle’s studio, ALONE TIME also evokes a more abstract space: the creative sanctuary any artist must carve out from everyday life for the serious business of making art. A bunker, a tree-house, a ‘room of one’s own’, it’s full to bursting with references to the humour, self-doubt and daily work ethic required to build and sustain an artistic practice – not to mention the magic wand.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Exhibition
Dear John/ Welcome Back/ With Love
It might be old-school, but everyone likes to get a postcard, and Wayne Youle’s latest project invites visitors to communicate their Gallery experience, create their own art mail or just write a letter to their mum.
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.
Article
Sparks that fly upwards
Curator Felicity Milburn remembers five years and 101 installations in a gallery without walls.
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
Viva Sydenham
It seems a lifetime ago that we combined with Gap Filler to launch the Gallery's first post-quake Outer Spaces project in Sydenham.
Collection
Wayne Youle The Saviour
In the weeks and months that followed the devastating earthquake on 22 February 2011, many Christchurch people looked in vain for a ‘hero on a white horse’ to lead the city out of crisis. Galloping creakily to nowhere, Wayne Youle’s riderless Saviour punctures the notion of a knight in shining armour. Instead, it emphasises his belief that this city’s salvation lies in the hands of ordinary people: all those who stayed – through choice or necessity – and contributed to the recovery in countless, unsung ways.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Exhibition
Tricksters
Expect the rug to be pulled out from under your feet with the last exhibition in the Rolling Maul series.
Notes
Wayne’s workshop
Wayne Youle ran a two-day workshop for 25 teenagers over the weekend. Students from an array of local Christchurch secondary schools were challenged to keep up with Wayne's non-stop energy... and to learn creative and design skills.
Notes
Where in the world is this year's first outer space?
So Wayne's wall is all done (and gloriously untagged) and Ronnie's peering out nightly over the Boulevard.
Notes
Shine on you crazy public art diamond
Just one last weather report, before this blog starts looking like a franchise of metservice.com...
Notes
LOVING THE BULLDOG
You could be forgiven for thinking that Wayne Youle is giving the French Bulldog a big hug.
Notes
What's going on in Sydenham?
Your father or grandfather probably had one. Maybe you've created one of your own. Possibly there's one on a wall at home, left there by a previous owner.
Exhibition
I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour
Stretching across a vast wall at the gateway to Sydenham, Wayne Youle's new public artwork is a shadowboard, where tools for rebuilding hang alongside many familiar but precious objects.
Notes
New bunker work installed
We've just had Wayne Youle in, creating a new work for the Gallery's carpark bunker.