Regular yet deformed, fragile yet robust, simple yet elaborate, uniform yet multiple, humble yet highfalutin—Monique Lacey’s squashed boxes are deeply dependent on counteraction. The artist not only reconciles opposing qualities, but also uses these to temper her experiments, preventing them from lapsing into extremes of asceticism or indulgence. The very form of the works derives from a process...
Encountering the work of Christina Pataialii for the first time, I was struck by her profound affinity for paint. I make this comment with a measure of trepidation, aware that the vast majority of artists choosing to concentrate on painting feel a strong connection with the medium. Few, however, wield paint with the conviction of Pataialii. Loaded with a multiplicity of smears, splatters, and...
The work of Oliver Perkins is the product of voracious looking, playful experimentation, and rigorous editing. His sources are diverse. He mines the histories of art, architecture, and design—now playing on the more restrained monochrome paintings of Robert Ryman, now the tubular balcony rails of 1990s apartment buildings in Alicante, Spain (until recently the artist’s home). … * Continue reading...
Between old new beginnings and aggregate categories, there’s an enticing idea of breaking things down and putting them together. A scrolled-back, shifty, recombinatory, and flexible form that feels right.[1]—Matt Saunders A painting that exceeds itself begs a profound question: How can one delimit any thing—even that most ostensibly autonomous thing, a painting?[2]—David Joselit I first meet...
Even before stepping foot inside Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery in the Auckland suburb of Titirangi, I was sold on the idea of Watching Windows. There is something immediately appealing about a show based on the window. I can think of few entities more fundamental to daily life and less celebrated. Symbolically, the window teems with content. As a point of departure for an exhibition, it...
Bruegel depicted many things that cannot be depicted… In all his works more is always implied than is depicted.[1]—Abraham Ortelius Swirling Dream-Wreck is the second exhibition to bring together paintings by Fu-On Chung and Sam Thomas. The first, ‘Nets’, was held towards the end of 2016 at GLOVEBOX, an artist-run space founded by Chung and several others in 2015 (and sadly now defunct). In the...
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.—L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953) Ian Fraser quotes this line in the final episode of the 1996 documentary series Revolution, which discusses the free-market reforms instituted by the Fourth Labour and National Governments in the 1980s and early 1990s.[1] In the context of the programme, the quotation evokes the gulf that...
Tēnā koe Pīpīwharauroa, Greetings to you, strong-winged traveller from warmer places, whose whistle-waiata is an augury of spring, stealthy trickster in iridescent camouflage, who lays her eggs in the nests of others that they may raise her young as tamariki whāngai! I write on behalf of Yolo the sister and Blu the brother, together known as Yllwbro. Being shy of disposition, preferring to remain...
There’s only one book in the world, and that’s the oneeveryone accurately misquotes.—Allen Curnow, ‘An Incorrigible Music’ An admission: these are not the works by Denys Watkins that I was expecting to include in Fluid structures. For a couple of years now, I have admired Watkins’ largely abstract paintings, works populated by organic shapes that evoke, among other things, the alien structures...
Artspace’s current exhibition, New Perspectives, features the work of more than 20 artists whose work has begun to make ripples in the local scene. Produced in collaboration with Berlin-based New Zealand artist Simon Denny, the show encompasses an impressive range of material, including eye-wateringly fine paper-based works by Motoko Kikkawa, visceral poems by Owen Connors (printed intransigently...