Exhibitions
Events
On display
Untitled by Séraphine Pick
Seraphine Pick Untitled 1998. Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1998. Reproduced with permission
Art Bite
Past event
Meet in the exhibition
Free
Join our senior curator Lara Strongman as she discusses Séraphine Pick's Untitled painting in the exhibition Your Hotel Brain on the first floor.
Art Bites are 30-minute lunchtime presentations on a single work on display, presented by our guides, curators and guest speakers.
There's a new Art Bite to enjoy each Friday at 12:30pm.
Related reading: Free event
Exhibition
Your Hotel Brain
13 May 2017 – 3 May 2018
Energies and anxieties from the threshold of the new millennium.
Collection
Séraphine Pick Untitled
Séraphine Pick is interested in intangibles. Her fluid, open-ended works suggest much, but confirm very little. Here, restless objects and figures break through a smoky blue-black field. Some are vividly painted, others only fragments, like half-remembered dreams or glimpses from flickering screens. Pick further complicates our experience with a series of cloaking devices – masks, hats, sunglasses, steam and smoke. “When you take something away,” she has said, “it makes people work at their own imagination, based on their own experiences. [They] have to think beyond what is there to fill in the gaps.”
(Absence, May 2023)
Article
Séraphine Pick: assumed identities
The celebrated faces gracing two of the paintings in Séraphine Pick's Brooke Gifford Gallery exhibition late last year wore expressions that were hard to pin down. Defensive, evasive and devoid of their customary charisma, the only thing they clearly conveyed was their wish to be somewhere – anywhere – else.
