Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016

Closely associated with notions of fame and popular culture, Andy Warhol was a leading name in American pop art, and renowned for using the aesthetics of advertising and commercial printing techniques in his work.

Warhol’s screenprint of Mao Tse-Tung was made when communist China’s founder was still alive. It adapted a portrait that was used throughout China in veneration of its leader and his ideas. The blue-faced Chairman Mao is one of a series of colour variations Warhol created, all equally startling. He made similar portraits of American icons including Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse.

As a young boy, Reuben Paterson used to play with the sparkling black sand on Piha beach; now as an artist he often uses glitter in his works. In this one, he took inspiration from Māori mythology connected with water, cleansing, transformation and stars. Pūtahitanga can mean constellation. Rehua was a son of Rangi-nui (the sky father) and Papa-tū-ā-nuku (the earth mother), and is associated in Tūhoe legend with the star Antares. To make this dazzling kaleidoscopic landscape, Paterson digitally layered and rearranged his own drawings. He likens the shifting black and white patterns to the restless energies and histories that have unfolded on the whenua (land) of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their optical push-and-pull highlights that what can be seen depends on who is doing the looking. What catches your eye?

(Wheriko - Brilliant! 17 May 2019 – 16 February 2020)

Julia Morison’s Tootoo was created as part of a brim-full series of multi-panelled paintings called Gargantua’s Petticoat. The series is an array of riotous provocation, full of abstracted sensual forms that allude to corsetry and piercings, petticoats and hula hoops, bed springs and bandages. Julia was painting lecturer at the University of Canterbury from 1999–2007. This followed eight years living in France, an originally unanticipated outcome of being awarded the one-year Moët et Chandon Fellowship artist residency in 1990.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

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.”