Shane Cotton Coloured Dirt Dreaming from The Haymaker Series (detail) 2012. Acrylic on linen. Cotton collection, Palmerston North
This exhibition is now closed
Touring Australia and New Zealand 2012–13
Cotton's skyscapes are some of the most haunting and ambitious New Zealand paintings of the past decade. The Hanging Sky brings them together with a spectacular body of new work.
Since the early 1990s Shane Cotton (Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) has been one of New Zealand's most acclaimed painters of landscape and memory. In the mid-2000s, however, his work headed in an unexpected direction – skywards. Employing a sombre new blue-black palette, Cotton painted the first in a major series of skyscapes – vast, nocturnal spaces where birds speed and plummet. Since then the series has become increasingly complex and ambitious, incorporating ragged red skywriting as well as ghostly 'marked heads'. Combining major recent paintings with a spectacular body of new work, The Hanging Sky showcases Cotton's faith in painting as a space of possibility and provocation – a place of leaps, freefalls and charged collisions between images.
Organised and toured by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in association with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky was exhibited at the IMA, Brisbane, from 8 December 2012 until 2 March 2013, and Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, from 23 March to 19 May 2013.
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Date:
City Gallery Wellington from 15 June until 6 October -
Curator:
Justin Paton -
Exhibition number:
893 -
In association with
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Part of
Collection works in this exhibition
Related reading: Outer Spaces
Exhibition
Shane Cotton: Baseland
7 June – 17 August 2014
Christchurch audiences at last have the opportunity to experience the complexity and ambition of Cotton's latest work in this two-venue exhibition by one of the biggest names in New Zealand art.
Article
Speaking sticks and moving targets
New works by Shane Cotton
The Hanging Sky brings together Shane Cotton's skyscapes from the past five years. But the core of the exhibition is a big group of freshly made works of art. Senior curator Justin Paton first saw them in completed form during the show's installation in Brisbane. Here he describes his encounters with a body of work 'at once beautiful, aggressive, protective and evasive.'
Interview
Shane Cotton
Back on 20 September 2011, when our public programmes team began setting up the Hagley Park Geo Dome for a talk with Shane Cotton, they put out about sixty chairs and would have been glad to fill them. After all, it was a cold night in Christchurch, the roads were rough, the Geo Dome was off the beaten track and the quake had long since broken the rhythm of the Gallery's old Wednesday night programme of public talks.
Notes
Why are you a painter and not another kind of artist?
'I just like the process of painting. I like remaking images in paint...'
Notes
Holloway Press 1994-2014
Last chance to view the Holloway Press exhibition at Central Library Peterborough this week so if you are in the neighbourhood and like beautifully printed, designed and hand-crafted books then make sure you head along.
Notes
Sian Torrington Call Out
Christchurch Art Gallery is excited to be working with Wellington-based artist Sian Torrington on a site-specific sculptural installation that will combine ideas, images and materials that relate to living in Christchurch now.
See below for a message from Sian to find out how you can get involved.
Notes
Outer Space programme sees Canterbury arts graduate exhibit work in Showhome
The Gallery's latest exhibition in the Outer Spaces programme, Showhome, has opened in Christchurch, featuring the disconcertingly 'perfect' works of recent University of Canterbury graduate Emily Hartley-Skudder.
Notes
Worcester Boulevard exhibition extended as publication developed
The popularity of Reconstruction: Conversations on a City has led to the exhibition being extended until 14 October, and the development of a publication.
Notes
The inner binding now on display at the library
If you've not been down to the Central Library Peterborough yet now's a good time to do it.
Notes
(Way Out)er Spaces
We're pretty pleased with what we're achieving with our Outer Spaces programme, but it's always good to see what else is out there. And I do mean 'out there'...
Notes
The ghost of studios past
In preparation for the next issue of Bulletin, Gallery photographer John and I have been out photographing some of the local artists who will be taking part in Rolling Maul when we reopen.
Interview
Silent Patterns
When we asked Tony de Lautour to produce a new work for the Bunker—the name Gallery staff give to the small, square elevator building at the front of the forecourt on Montreal Street—he proposed a paint scheme inspired by Dazzle camouflage. Associated with the geometric near-abstraction of the vorticist movement, Dazzle was developed by British and American artists during the First World War to disguise shipping. It was a monumental form of camouflage that aimed not to hide the ship but to break up its mass visually and confuse enemies about its speed and direction. In a time before radar and sonar were developed, Dazzle was designed to disorientate German U-boat commanders looking through their periscopes, and protect the merchant fleets.
Senior curator Lara Strongman spoke with Tony de Lautour in late January 2016.
My Favourite
Peter Stichbury's NDE
Anna Worthington chooses her favourite work from the Gallery collection.
Article
Sparks that fly upwards
Curator Felicity Milburn remembers five years and 101 installations in a gallery without walls.