The aim of this exhibition is simple: to provide a platform for five contemporary artists from Aotearoa whom I admire. That the show comprises non-figurative works in watercolour, or the closely related medium of ink, is in part a consequence of the many (perhaps too many) hours I spent thinking about the major painting show Necessary Distraction, which opened at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki...
What painting needs is hecklers, groupies, buffs, aficionados, nerds, family members and fans.—Justin Paton[1] I met Simon McIntyre some months ago, following a conversation event with artist Amber Wilson at Anna Miles Gallery. It was a short meeting, but I remember being struck by McIntyre’s liveliness and warmth, and the fact that he, like me, grew up in the household of a painter. A few days...
I first encountered the work of Amber Wilson in 2013 at Porous Moonlight, a painting show at the unassuming Papakura Art Gallery, curated by Wilson’s friend (and then studio-mate) Imogen Taylor. Her works, all oils, hung alongside paintings by an unlikely, but totally satisfying, assortment of living and dead artists, including Frances Hodgkins, Denys Watkins, Nicola Farquhar, and Claudia Jowitt...