Exhibitions
Events
On display
Lovely Rita: Screening + Q & A
Gaylene Preston, Hope Wire set, photo supplied by Gaylene Preston.
Rita Angus, Cass, 1936
Film
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
Director Dame Gaylene Preston joins us for this special screening of Lovely Rita: A Painter’s Life, a documentary surveying the life and work of artist Rita Angus. The film screening will be followed by a Q & A between curator Peter Vangioni and the filmmaker.
A number of works by Rita Angus are currently on display in the Gallery including Cass in From Here on the Ground and A Goddess of Mercy in Perilous.
Lovely Rita: A Painter’s Life screened in the Doc Edge Festival in 2007.
Running time 70 mins, G, 2007.
Related
Exhibition
From Here on the Ground
18 May – 17 November 2024
Populated places and cityscapes converge with backyards, factories and remote railway stops in this fascinating survey of twentieth-century Aotearoa New Zealand artists exploring urban, suburban and industrial landscapes.
Exhibition
Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection
6 August 2022 – 21 July 2024
Making room for fresh voices, untold narratives and disruptive ideas.
Collection
Rita Angus A Goddess of Mercy
Ōtautahi-trained painter Rita Angus is known for her distinctive graphic style, clear light and bold colours. A Goddess of Mercy is the first of three goddess works she painted. Informed by her feminist worldview, Rita saw the goddess portraits as the most important examples of her pacifist ideas. This work also has personal significance. Rita’s sister Edna died suddenly in 1940, and the pattern on the subject’s skirt comes from one of Edna’s favourite outfits. Surrounding the figure we see symbolic clues to a relationship with nature: a deer at the figure’s side, willow branches forming a halo around her head and the crocus flower clasped in her hand, a hopeful sign for the coming of spring.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )