Exhibitions
Events
On display
Julie King Memorial Lecture: Julia Waite
Julie King. Photo: Jenny May, 2017
Talk
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
A new annual lecture established in the memory of art historian and long-term supporter and patron of the Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery Julie King. Presented by the Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.
The inaugural lecture, 'Exiles and Expatriates: Modern Women and States of Unbelonging', will be delivered by Julia Waite, curator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and introduced by Jenny May.
We are now coming to understand the vital role women played in the rise of modern art in Aotearoa, many voyaging out to train in Europe, and returning with new ideas and modes of practice. So how can we properly account for the work of itinerant modern women who have long resisted an easy place in New Zealand art history?
Looking at the work of artists including Mina Arndt, Rhona Haszard, Frances Hodgkins, Flora Scales and Helen Stewart, Waite will reflect on the way expatriate identities effectively made these women cultural exiles in their home country of New Zealand. She will explore alternative ways to think about their exilic experience – more as a superpower than a weakness.
Bookings advised.
Related reading: Friends, Free event
Exhibition
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
30 May 2020 – 3 July 2022
Experience the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean.
Collection
Sydney Lough Thompson A Street In An Arab Village, Tunisia
One of New Zealand’s best-known expatriate artists, Sydney Lough Thompson first left New Zealand in 1900 to study in Paris. His visit to the small fishing village of Concarneau in Brittany in 1902 had a profound and lifelong impact on his career. At Concarneau, Thompson found the ideal location to raise a family while developing his artistic practice. For the remainder of his life he divided his time between New Zealand and Concarneau, and numerous expatriate artists from New Zealand would make the pilgrimage to Concarneau to visit him, including Olivia Spencer Bower, Frances Hodgkins, Maud Sherwood, Archibald Nicoll, Flora Scales, Cora Wilding and Rhona Haszard. Thompson developed an expressive style of painting through the use of thickly applied paint and a brightly coloured palette. His work proved extremely popular in New Zealand, with Olivia Spencer Bower commenting on his exhibition in Christchurch in 1924 that: ‘Everyone took notice; he’d brought more colour than had been in the place. … He gave impetus to the local art world and one noticed from that time a bold change in the colour of local artists.’ (Brought to Light, November 2009)
Collection
Sydney Lough Thompson Almond blossom, Grasse
One of New Zealand’s best-known expatriate artists, Sydney Lough Thompson first left New Zealand in 1900 to study in Paris. His visit to the small fishing village of Concarneau in Brittany in 1902 had a profound and lifelong impact on his career. At Concarneau, Thompson found the ideal location to raise a family while developing his artistic practice. For the remainder of his life he divided his time between New Zealand and France, and numerous expatriate artists from New Zealand made the pilgrimage to Concarneau to visit him, including Olivia Spencer Bower, Frances Hodgkins, Maud Sherwood, Archibald Nicoll, Flora Scales, Cora Wilding and Rhona Haszard. Thompson developed an expressive style of painting through the use of thickly applied paint and a brightly coloured palette. He often painted trees in blossom, both in France and in New Zealand, and this work depicts a spring scene from Grasse, on the French Riviera. From 1925 to 1933, Thompson and his wife spent winter and spring there, returning to Concarneau for the summer and autumn.
(Turn, Turn, Turn: A Year in Art, 27 July 2019 – 8 March 2020)
Commentary
Identities of Journey and Return
It was the novelty of seeing white people rendered by a Japanese artist that tickled me when I first saw Utagawa Sadahide’s woodblock prints of foreigners in Yokohama in the 1860s. There’s something slightly clumsy about the Westerners’ exaggerated noses and the forced rounding of their eyes. You can sense, in these images, the artist’s struggle to detach himself from the conventions of Japanese art and beauty; his lines waver here, unlike his assertive depictions of long, flat Japanese faces in earlier prints.
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.
Article
Exquisite Treasure Revealed
Canterbury Museum holds two albums compiled by Diamond Harbour artist Margaret Stoddart. The older of the two, containing images featured in this Bulletin, and itself currently exhibited in the Gallery, covers the period 1886–96. The album is handsomely bound in maroon, and stamped M.O.S. in gold. It contains a sort of travelogue by way of black and white photographs set amongst decorative painting, mostly of native flora, with some locality and date information.
Notes
How to Book Friends Tickets
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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.
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.
