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Andrew Drummond is a Christchurch-based artist who works across different media, best known for his large-scale kinetic sculptures and installations. A major survey of his work was held at Christchurch Art Gallery in 2010.

Drummond takes a transformative approach to materials, and has sometimes incorporated meticulously hand-polished pieces of coal into his sculptural work. His photograph of this elemental material in its jewel-like, modified state utilises double exposure, and is from a series exploring the subtle, varying effects of rotation, reflection and light. (Above ground, 2015)

Julia Morison’s 'Some thing, for example' is like a broken life-support system for the waiting, blob-like entity which, although securely caged, seems more traumatised than dangerous, and without anybody to administer aid.

Like all who experienced the 2010–11 earthquakes in Canterbury, Morison, living near the edge of Christchurch’s cordoned ‘red zone’, was delivered a frequent heightened dose of adrenaline. With this, she encountered new aesthetic possibilities in found, discarded objects; sculptural media of a kind that the physical environment had never previously supplied. From a situation of dislocation and abandonment, she has created work of an unexpected material and formal beauty. (Above ground, 2015)

In 2010, the ex-Auckland, Los Angeles-based Fiona Connor produced nine precise replicas of the bedroom windows of a group of art gallery attendants. Connor’s flexible installation plan sees these replica windows fitted into cavities in a building’s walls, allowing views into the fabric of its hidden structure.

'What you bring with you to work' tests out various ideas, implicit in its title, including the imprint of a person's home environment, and the meeting of private and public space. In a local, post-earthquake context, Connor's window structures may gather a different set of associations. (Above ground, 2015)

Lois White was a prominent, individualistic voice in New Zealand painting in the 1930s and 1940s, who attracted attention with her modernistic, art-deco style figure compositions.

A student at Elam School of Fine of Arts in Auckland in the 1920s, White also taught there for many years from 1928. Equally interested in the old masters as in the cubists and other modern painters, she admitted looking at “anything that I could get my eyes and brain working on […] I was very taken with all the figure compositions of Botticelli.”

Such varied sources are evident in her dramatic depiction of Adam and Eve, the first humans in the biblical account of the creation of the world. Painted at the start of World War II, it may be seen as an allegorical reflection on the human condition. (In Modern Times, 18 December 2015 – 11 September 2016)

Ted Bracey painted this jazzily modernistic work while in his final diploma year in 1959 at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. Echoing the early analytical cubist paintings of Georges Braque, it also shows the influence of Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger, all of whom Bracey had studied, even if only through reproductions. The ongoing possibilities of cubism were also being drawn out at this time by his peers and more established New Zealand painters including Louise Henderson and Colin McCahon.

Bracey, then twenty-three, exhibited this work in the 1959 Group exhibition, after which it nearly became the first purely abstract painting to enter the city’s art collection. Its modernity, however, proved a stumbling block when city councillors controversially overruled the Gallery’s art advisory committee recommendation to buy it. The painting was purchased directly from Bracey in 2002, shortly after his retirement as head of the School of Fine Arts. (In Modern Times, 18 December 2015 – 11 September 2016)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s The Drawbridge is one of sixteen plates from a folio of prints depicting imaginary prisons that has repeatedly haunted and inspired writers, artists and architects for over two and a half centuries. Three of Piranesi’s Carceri engravings, for example, were included in Alfred H. Barr’s exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.

First issued in 1749–50, but attracting little attention to begin with, the series was republished with heavily reworked plates in 1761, yielding darker, more detailed and more resolved prints that brought an attendant increase to their public reception and acclaim. (Above ground, 2015)

Many artists have depicted this city’s urban spaces, including Ivy Fife, who studied at the Canterbury College School of Art from 1920 to 1931 and taught there from 1936 until 1959.

Fife captured the clamour of Christchurch’s railway station on Moorhouse Avenue during the new Queen’s royal visit. Opened in 1877, the station had been a handsome structure, but by 1954 its Venetian gothic arches were under lean-to additions and its brick warmth covered in paint. Demolition came five years later; its replacement, a landmark modernist building, was itself demolished after the Christchurch earthquakes.

(Above ground, 2015)

This work is from the Canterbury Public Library’s collection of original art works. This collection was started by Ron O’Reilly (1914-1982), who was appointed City Librarian in 1951. He had a keen interest in philosophy, literature and New Zealand art and developed personal friendships with many artists including Doris Lusk, Olivia Spencer Bower, Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston. During his time in Christchurch he was deeply involved in the local art scene. He arranged many exhibitions in the library one such being McCahon’s The Wake in 1959. He liaised with other galleries in arranging the loans of paintings for other exhibitions, and for a period was art critic for the Press and picture buyer for the CSA Gallery. In 1953 the Library started its hire service of framed art prints, a selection of 80 reproductions which was confined to works by artists of importance in the history of painting, both old and modern masters. Shortly afterwards the Library’s collection was augmented by two substantial gifts, one from the Redfern Gallery, London of 34 original lithographs by British artists and the other, 39 prints from French cultural funds. In 1955 the City Council approved extension of the picture loan service to include original art works by local artists. The maximum purchase price was to be 19 guineas and because of this limitation the artists were often persuaded to sell their work at reduced prices. The prospect of having one’ s work on such public display was also an inducement to the artist to sell at a reasonable price. By 1960, 50 original works had been acquired. The paintings were selected by Ron O’Reilly at exhibitions, galleries and by visiting the artists in their homes.

In 1981, when purchasing ceased, the collection consisted of 297 works. 155 of these were gifted to the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in 2001. Adapted from “Library Treasures: New Zealand art works from the collection of the Canterbury Public Library, exhibited at the CSA Gallery, 9 February to 5 March 1989”.

Adelaide-born Dorrit Black was at the forefront of bringing modern art to Australia after returning from Europe in 1929. This lively, cubist-inspired linocut shows the impact of her European studies, which included three months in 1927 at the Grosvenor School of Art in London with printmaker Claude Flight, and classes in Paris with the cubist painters André Lhote and Albert Gleizes from 1927–28.

Black was based in Sydney from 1930. Her first solo exhibition that year included Australia’s first cubist landscape painting, The Bridge, portraying the Sydney Harbour Bridge being constructed. In 1931, she opened the Modern Art Centre in Sydney, and became the first woman to establish a gallery in Australia. Black returned to Adelaide in 1935, and remained influential, including through her teaching at the South Australian School of Art.

(In Modern Times, 18 December 2015 – 11 September 2016)

Eileen Mayo was invited to exhibit in the Second Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts at the Redfern Gallery in London in 1930 without having yet learned the technique. A talented young designer, illustrator and printmaker who had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, she received the invitation from Claude Flight, the linocut’s principal champion. Mayo met Flight, who taught in London at the Grosvenor School of Art, while working there in 1929 as a life-class model; she was reportedly instructed by him on linocut technique over the telephone.

Shown in the 1930 exhibition, Turkish Bath in its flattened space and use of decorative pattern displays the influence of the emerging art deco style, as promoted by Flight alongside futurism and cubism. Mayo moved to Australia in 1952 and ten years later to New Zealand, where she established a reputation as a significant printmaker and teacher. (In Modern Times, 18 December 2015 – 11 September 2016)

A New Zealand-born artist of German parentage, Frank Weitzel pursued art studies in San Francisco, New York and Munich before moving in 1928 to Sydney in his early twenties. There he established a reputation within modernist circles with his sculpture and textile designs, exhibiting alongside other well-travelled artists including Dorrit Black, Grace Cossington Smith, Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin.

Weitzel moved to London in 1931, attracting critical attention while showing with artists such as Jacob Epstein, Paul Nash, John Nash and the printmaker Claude Flight, whose cubist- and futurist-influenced linocuts impacted his new work. Taking on sculpture commissions, he also designed posters for Shell and the London Underground, and planned to exhibit in Berlin, San Francisco and London. His life was tragically cut short, however, in 1932 by tetanus poisoning.

At the height of his promise, he was just 26. (In Modern Times, 18 December 2015 – 11 September 2016)