Carl Sydow Around 1971. Perspex, hose. Sydow family collection
Carl Sydow Meander I 1971. Mixed media. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1971
This exhibition is now closed
1960s London set the scene for Carl Sydow’s playful, op-inspired sculptures.
Carl Sydow was one of a bright new generation of New Zealand sculptors who came to the fore during the 1960s and 70s, alongside John Panting, Stephen Furlonger and Leon Narbey. These artists rejected traditional sculptural materials and processes, choosing instead plastics, fibreglass and welded steel. Sydow’s works include sheets of zinc suspended on springs that shimmer when they move, as well as colourful garden hoses threaded through a sheet of Perspex.
Tragically, Sydow’s life was cut short in 1975 aged thirty-five. At the time, his career was in full flight and he was viewed by many as one of New Zealand’s leading sculptors. Tomorrow Never Knows focuses on the playful, up-tempo works produced in the last five years of the artist’s life and includes several sculptures from the Gallery’s collection alongside suites of his op-inspired drawings.
-
Date:
25 March – 23 July 2017 -
Curator:
Peter Vangioni -
Exhibition number:
1030
Collection works in this exhibition
Related reading: Op + Pop
Carl Sydow (1940-1975) Memorial Exhibition catalogue
Carl Sydow (1940-1975) Memorial Exhibition
Exhibition: 2 - 31 May 1979
Catalogue for an exhibition held in memory of Christchurch sculptor Carl Sydow at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.
Designed by Max Hailstone and Hamish Thompson. Photograpy by Glenn Jowitt.
Text conritubtions by T.L. Rodney Wilson, Dr. Peter Lineham, Tom Taylor and B. V. Cleavin.
35 pages
Interview
Sideslip
Sydow: Tomorrow Never Knows recently opened at Gallery and the exhibition’s curator, Peter Vangioni, took the opportunity to interview UK-based sculptor Stephen Furlonger. Furlonger was a contemporary of Carl Sydow and mutual friend and fellow sculptor John Panting, both at art school in Christchurch and in London during the heady days of the mid 1960s. His path as an artist during the late 1950s and 1960s in many ways mirrored that of Sydow and Panting.
Notes
To the memory of Julian Dashper
One of the highlights for staff over the eight or so years that the Christchurch Art Gallery was open prior to the shakes was the opportunity to work alongside Julian Dashper on his exhibition To The Unknown New Zealander.
Notes
Untitled 1956 by Gordon Walters
This article first appeared as 'Balancing act' in The Press on 17 August 2012.
Notes
Glittering
When it comes to posting comprehensive pictures of your new exhibitions online, opinion is divided.
Notes
Selected proofs
Peter Trevelyan's exhibition Selected Proofs is currently on at the University of Canterbury's SOFA Gallery until 7th September.
Article
The pleasure of making: objects taking centre stage in the space of the art gallery
Was it serendipity that the opening of Christchurch Art Gallery's Burster Flipper Wobbler Dripper Spinner Stacker Shaker Maker coincided with that of Slip Cast, a group exhibition at the Dowse Art Museum that also focused on the pleasure that artists take in manipulating materials in the process of making art?
Article
New Zealand in the Biennale of Sydney and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
Collection
Simon Morris June Pause
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
Packed with an energetic sense of movement, Simon Morris’s painting gives the effect of a boldly rhythmic musical score. Its pattern, appearing at first to be random or chaotic, is found to be sequenced and repeating, and with diagonals regularly breaking up the picture plane.
Morris builds on the legacy of pioneering New Zealand geometric abstractionists such as Carl Sydow and Gordon Walters. This optical sequence was generated by a mathematical formula, which he says “creates images that I wouldn’t come up with myself. It’s like the system partly makes the work.”
Collection
Gordon Walters Black on white
Gordon Walters is best-known for work that fused the influence of European modernist art and Māori and Pacific art forms, particularly the koru motif of painted kōwhaiwhai rafter designs. Walters’ influences from European modernism included the hard-edged geometric abstractions of Victor Vasarely and Auguste Herbin, seen while in Europe in 1950–51. Walters made his first optically charged ‘koru paintings’ in 1956, but didn’t show them until 1966 when he first exhibited this painting in Auckland.
Walters’ adaptation of the koru has been both admired and criticised by cultural commentators. Walters himself, when discussing the motif, increasingly focused on the fine mechanics of abstraction:
'What I’ve done to the form is push it more in the direction of geometry. So that I can have in my painting not only a positive/negative effect of black and white, but I can also have a working of vertical and horizontal, which is equally important.' (Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)
