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E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Out of the Blue: Christina Barton on Archives and Writing
Talk
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
Eminent art historian and writer Christina Barton discusses her new book, Out of the Blue: Essays on Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand 1985–2021 as a project drawing on archival resources and an archive in and of itself.
Christina Barton MNZM is an art historian, curator, art writer, editor and educator. She was director of Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery from 2007 to 2023 and taught art history at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington from 1995 to 2007. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including the major Billy Apple retrospective at Auckland Art Gallery in 2015. Her writing has been published widely, and she has contributed as an editor of journals Antic and Reading Room, and volumes including the collected art writings of Wystan Curnow. Her major monograph, Billy Apple® Life/Work, was published in 2020, and her essay collection Out of the Blue: Essays on Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand 1985–2021 was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2025.
Related reading: Free event
Commentary
Impasse after impasse
"Reinventions can be local, low-key, small scale and subtle in their specific effects."
Allan Smith, 1995
Among the selection of paintings that make up Delirium Crossing, Barbara Tuck’s Iris Gate stands apart. Painted in 1999, it is the earliest work in the show. Rather than the single square paintings that follow, this is a set of six rectangular canvases. Though small in scale, they are notable for their gestural vigour and looseness, their coloured grounds looking stubbornly like painted surfaces upon which figural elements float like collage fragments. No airy atmospherics, vertiginous perspectives, intricate tracery: ‘landscape’ has yet to appear. Equally, recalling earlier works, Iris Gate departs from the shaped, multipart, laser-cut aluminium paintings for which the artist became known in the early 1990s. Against the flow of art history, it marks a return to convention, in both format and facture, a backwards move to rectilinearity and the brush.
