Exhibitions
Events
On display
Visit to Philip Trusttum’s Studio
Philip Trusttum in the studio, 2018. Photo: John Collie
Philip Trusttum Chopping 1987–2000. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, presented by the artist 2009
Friends
Past event
$30 / Friends $20 / students with ID $10
A rare opportunity to visit the Christchurch studio of well-known Canterbury artist Philip Trusttum. THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED.
Trusttum will give an introduction to his work and processes, followed by afternoon tea in the studio.
Book by Thursday 10 September.
Please email friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz if you have any special dietary requirements by this date.
Related reading: Friends
Exhibition
Trusttum: Just a Glimpse
24 October 2018 – 16 June 2019
Exuberant and boisterous, these large paintings by Philip Trusttum will lift the spirits
Exhibition
Done: Recent Drawing Books by Philip Trusttum
23 September – 28 October 2013
A selection of drawing books by one of Canterbury's best known artists featuring cute children's toys pulled together in bizarre and sometimes malevolent combinations through the process of drawing.
Exhibition
Philip Trusttum: Put On
20 September – 18 November 2013
Influenced by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Philip Trusttum's drawings for Stereoscope are a personal tribute to the Russian activist collective and post-punk group, Pussy Riot.
Collection
Philip Trusttum Still Life, (Garden)
This expressively painted view of dying sunflowers in Philip Trusttum’s back garden in Berry Street, Christchurch, is typical of his work from the mid-1970s. It was painted following a trip he had taken to the United Kingdom, Europe and New York in 1972. “I did a kind of backward flip when I saw the Van Gogh paintings in Europe. The works at that time were very much a backward glance to move on towards something new.” Trusttum’s garden, and the activities of his young family, provided the inspiration for his work over the following years, which drew considerable critical acclaim.
(Turn, Turn, Turn: A Year in Art, 27 July 2019 – 8 March 2020)
Collection
Philip Trusttum Red Berries
Gardens provided Philip Trusttum with much inspiration during the early to mid 1970s, when the artist produced a body of paintings often referred to as the Garden Series. Vivid, expressive views of plants, painted from both the outside and inside of his house, fill lushly painted surfaces. Works such as this one convey an energy and exuberance that reflect the painter’s own character. (1969 Comeback Special 27 August – 6 November 2016)
Commentary
Philip Trusttum and the Squashed Painting
The painting is of a head on the end of a knife; it’s called Not Good (2014). Trusttum is better known for paintings that exude pleasure, their subject matter including physical exercise, sensuality and music, childhood, games and toys, animals, and ordinary domestic tasks such as mowing the lawn—life. There is pleasure and life too in the way he paints—in dancing, hyperactive line and luscious colour. It might seem anomalous, then, for Trusttum to paint something that is “not good”. When I interviewed him for Art New Zealand in 2011, he hinted at a bleaker side to his work, but said: “Stay away from explaining any darker meaning. I mean, we’ve got the earthquakes here.” There is something to be said, though, for complicating the perception of Trusttum’s pictures as purely hedonistic.
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.
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.
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.
