Name: Untitled by Séraphine Pick
Location: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

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

Your Hotel Brain

3 May 2018

Energies and anxieties from the threshold of the new millennium.

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.

Continued

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