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    • Designing the alphabet with Julian Hooper
      • Megan Dunn is Curator Special Projects at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. A is for addictive! Last year I discovered the alphabet paintings of Tamaki Mākaurau Auckland based artist Julian Hooper and was instantly hooked. Since 2018, Hooper has amassed multiple drawings and paintings of the alphabet. His palette is stylised and pared back, […] The post Designing the alphabet with Julian Hooper appeared first on City Gallery.

    • City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi says goodbye to Quasi
      • One of Wellington’s most recognisable sculptures leaves the roof of City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi this week, after five years surveying the city and its inhabitants. Quasiby Ronnie van Hout was initially commissioned by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in 2016, to grace the roof of Christchurch Art Gallery following the 2011 […] The post City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi says goodbye to Quasi appeared first on City Gallery.

    • Speaking in Darkness — Tobias Allen in Conversation
      • Performance artist Tobias Allen sat down with City Gallery Wellington’s Public Programmes Specialist, Graham Frost to discuss How Far Do Your Arms Reach? his upcoming collaborative performance with Footnote New Zealand Dance, commissioned by City Gallery Wellington to mark the exhibition Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days.  Can you tell us about the inspiration behind How Far Do […] The post Speaking in Darkness — Tobias Allen in Conversation appeared first on City Gallery.

    • Generation X looks back and remembers
      • Megan Dunn is Curator Special Projects at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. Satan is much bigger than I thought. I gasped when I saw her taken out of the crate. The two exhibition installers, Robin and Ollie ushered Satan into the red room and put her down on a pair of chucks. Chucks are […] The post Generation X looks back and remembers appeared first on City Gallery.

    • City Gallery Te Whare Toi brings Julian Hooper: The Letter to National Library of New Zealand
      • 20 August 2024 It may be coincidence, but the first exhibition City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi is showing in partnership with National Library of New Zealand Te Puna o Mātauranga o Aotearoa is all about letters. JulianHooper:TheLetteris a City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi exhibition shown at National Library of New Zealand Te Puna […] The post City Gallery Te Whare Toi brings Julian Hooper: The Letter to National Library of New Zealand appeared first on City Gallery.

    • City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi announces partnership with National Library Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa
      • 18 July 2024 City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi is partnering with National Library Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, to continue to bring exhibitions to Wellington while the gallery is temporarily away from home. Wheako Pōneke Experience Wellington Tumu Whakarae Diana Marsh says the agreement with National Library, part of Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of […] The post City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi announces partnership with National Library Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa appeared first on City Gallery.

    • City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi celebrates internationally renowned pioneering artist and gay rights activist
      • 10 July 2024 A new exhibition celebrates the work, activism and legacy of UK artist Derek Jarman, while also teasing out his connection to Aotearoa New Zealand. Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days will be presented at The Dowse Art Museum in partnership with City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi from 28 September 2024 to 26 January […] The post City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi celebrates internationally renowned pioneering artist and gay rights activist appeared first on City Gallery.

    • City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi celebrates Chartwell Collection with big noisy group show
      • 4 July 2024 What do a series of DIY modernist birdhouses, a perpetually spinning CD, and Minnie Dean’s unmarked grave have in common? They all feature in Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection. City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, in its first show away from home, is celebrating the Chartwell Collection with a […] The post City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi celebrates Chartwell Collection with big noisy group show appeared first on City Gallery.

    • City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi continues to bring art to Wellington despite leaving home
      • City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi will continue to bring two significant exhibitions to Wellington this year despite disruptive construction work temporarily forcing it out of its iconic building in Te Ngākau Civic Square. Wheako Pōneke Experience Wellington Tumu Whakarae Chief Executive Diana Marsh says her team has worked incredibly hard alongside partner institutions Museum […] The post City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi continues to bring art to Wellington despite leaving home appeared first on .

    • Divine symmetry
      • In her new exhibition, contemporary artist Julia Morison channels a new source of influence through her otherworldly art practice: the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint.By Theo Macdonald published by North & South Magazine In the mid-70s, freshly delivered from the art-school womb, multi-media artist Julia Morison (now 72) found herself swaddled in the spiky […] The post Divine symmetry appeared first on .

    • Contemporary artists explore the stories we tell in Memory Lines 
      • 29 February 2024 Five contemporary artists explore how knowledge can be shared across time and culture in Memory Lines, a new exhibition opening at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi.  The show brings together the work of Fiona Clark, Kirtika Kain, Rozana Lee, Sriwhana Spong and Hōhua Thompson (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Awa, Ngāti […] The post Contemporary artists explore the stories we tell in Memory Lines  appeared first on City Gallery.

    • Neo-pop crocodiles feature in playful show at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi
      • January 2024 A new series of work, showcasing an entourage of neo-pop crocodiles, features in a new exhibition opening at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi next month. Turbo Croc 2.0 riffs off the evolution of multi-disciplinary artist Ahsin Ahsin’s half-human/half crocodile hybrid ‘Croc’ character, born out of research into amphora black-figure vase paintings, common […] The post Neo-pop crocodiles feature in playful show at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi appeared first on City Gallery.

    • Eerie Pageantry combines artists’ fascination with folk horror and art
      • 11 October 2023 Visitors to City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi will delve into the folk horror genre when a new exhibition opens later this month. Eerie Pageantry brings together the work of New Zealand modernist artist Don Driver (1930-2011) and prominent contemporary Australian artist Julia Robinson, who both make art that balances dark content with […] The post Eerie Pageantry combines artists’ fascination with folk horror and art appeared first on City Gallery.

    • The sound of one hand waving 
      • By City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi Experience Wellington Curator Megan Dunn From his perch on the rooftop of City Gallery Wellington Quasi looks forward to the rebuild of Te Ngākau Civic Square. One wind-frightened day, a little boy in a yellow rain jacket turned back and looked across Te Ngākau Civic Square, his face […] The post The sound of one hand waving appeared first on .

    • On the Lure of the Sea
      • By Experience Wellington Curator Megan Dunn. Originally published on ArtNow.NZ. Alexis Hunter, mermaids and me THE LURE OF THE SEA is an oil painting by Alexis Hunter, but I first fell for it as a jpeg. I dragged and dropped it into a PowerPoint called ‘The Muse of War: Mermaids, Hybridity and Feminism in the art […]

    • Through a glass, glittery
      • By City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi Senior Curator Aaron Lister One of my favourite views of the exhibition Reuben Paterson: The Only Dream Left is from outside City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi at night. Looking through the glass doors you see that a four-and-a-half metre glittered tree has mysteriously taken root. The Golden […]

    • Ask Me Anything: Reuben Paterson
      • Exhibiting artist Reuben Paterson sits down to answer questions submitted by our audience. What is your advice to young artists? What is the inspiration behind your work Koro? What is your view on secondary art markets and equity for artists? Best and worst things about working with Glitter? Reuben answers these questions and more. The […]

    • Artists in Conversation: Martin Basher and Ben Buchanan
      • Artists Martin Basher and Ben Buchanan sit down for a candid conversation about their work, practice and the ideas that have brought them together for the exhibition SOUR GRAPES. Both artists push painting beyond the frame, into other media, onto walls, floors and into the world in order to explore some of the possibilities and […]

    • Simon Morris on Room of Time
      • Te Whanganui-a-Tara artist Simon Morris has made site-based paintings in most of Aotearoa’s public galleries. In this video series, we sit down with Simon to unpack his most recent work Walking Drawing as part of the exhibition Room of Time. Abstract in form and impermanent in nature, this painting exists only for the duration of […]

    • Art, Authorship & Reuse
      • Hosted by Caitlin Lynch · December 2, 2022 Sampling, reuse and copying have long been strategies and approaches in artistic practice and is a thread you can follow through art history. But who owns art? Should culture be under copyright? What are the limits of fair use? These questions are explored in the recent artworks exhibited at City […]

    • Debra Bustin: Illustrated Talk
      • City Gallery Wellington is excited to share an illustrated talk by artist Debra Bustin presenting her history of art making and exhibition. With exhibitions described in the press as ‘opulent phantasmagoria’ and ‘unexpected and undecipherable’, Debra Bustin has led an ambitious and challenging art practice spanning several decades. In this illustrated talk using documentation rarely […]

    • The Maker
      • Words by Maggie Tweedie. Originally published on Island.com. It’s both effortless and impractical to follow the work of Joanna Margaret Paul. Much like the words which emerge throughout her paintings, she is ever evolving. Imagined in the Context of a Room, gathers a breadth of works, spanning decades of her life from the early 70s to the […]

    • Notes on: Fruiting bodies
      • ‘Notes On’ is an online weekly exhibition column by Connie Brown. Originally published in The Art Paper, Issue 04. Online, mycology forums mimic their object of study. Threads accumulate, spreading deep and wide, bifurcate, and loop back upon themselves as users post images, seek help in identifying an unknown species, discuss medicinal uses, or simply […]

    • Thinking Out Loud: Moya Lawson
      • Moya Lawson on the development of At Thresholds at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. Originally published on Art Now, read the essay here. Making art about other species seems less restrained than writing about them. The artists in At Thresholds are experimental with their practices, harnessing colour, shape, and material—the organic and the machine. […]

    • Glen Hayward: Wish You Were Here
      • Artist Glen Hayward take us deeper with anecdotes and insights into the works that make up Wish You Were Here. Glen Hayward’s work blends carving, painting and conceptualism to snare the viewer in a standoff around what is real or illusionary, art or not art, profound or absurd. Wish You Were Here focuses on his […]

    • MATARAU – New group exhibition at City Gallery big on scale and ambition
      • City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi’s exhibition Matarau responds to our turbulent times and exploresthe role that art can play in navigating new found complexities of everyday life. Matarau is a group exhibition of contemporary Māori art, guest curated by Walters Prize-winning Pōnekeartist, writer and curator, Shannon Te Ao. It features all new work made […]

    • Access to Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings on Saturday 12 March 
      • Due to a gathering at Te Ngākau Civic Square this Saturday, entry to Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings will be via our Harris Street entrance. We are closing our main entrance to ensure visitor safety following notification of a gathering by Freedoms & Rights Coalition in this space on Saturday. This is likely to […]

    • Ummu: Hilma af Klint Here and Now
      • Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings, curated by Sue Cramer, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 11 June–19 September 2021, and City Gallery Wellington, 4 December 2021–17 March 2022.

    • Box Set 2020 Liner Notes
      • .As a fundraiser, we asked thirteen artists we’ve worked with to produce prints for a boxed portfolio. The portfolios were for sale to members of our Foundation at a special event on 22 October 2020. They all sold—a big success. Thanks to everyone. Here are the Box Set 2020 liner notes. This portfolio emerges from and celebrates City Gallery Wellington’s programme. On the occasion of the Gallery’s fortieth anniversary, we invited thirteen New Zealand artists who we’ve worked with in recent years to contribute a Giclee print. We included artists from different generations—established names and newer figures—whose work we knew would suit the medium. The project’s purpose is to raise funds for City Gallery Wellington Foundation, to support the work of the Gallery. We produced fifty-five sets, forty for sale, thirteen for the artists, and two for City Gallery’s archives. In developing this miscellany, our curators had two earlier boxed sets in mind aesthetically. One was David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups (1965). Containing thirty-six loose reproductions of celebrity studio portraits by the London photographer, it epitomised the swinging 1960s. The other was Multiples (1969), published by Auckland’s Barry Lett Galleries. These twelve screenprints by canonical New Zealand painters—including Don Binney, Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon, and Gordon Walters—helped popularise New Zealand contemporary art. Our thanks go to the Box Set 2020 artists, for generously supporting this project. If you have acquired Box Set 2020, we thank you too. Thanks to the artists and collectors both, for supporting our ongoing work—to present the best of contemporary art. Elizabeth Caldwell, Director | Kaitohu Matua, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi / Jan Kelly, Chair | Heamana, City Gallery Wellington Foundation Martin Basher (b.1979) Untitled 2017/2020 Martin Basher addresses the aesthetics and politics of display, the points where art and commercial display meet and blur. In 2014, City Gallery presented his show Blackberry Schnapps, featuring work he had just made as artist in residence at McCahon House in Titirangi. Untitled digitally restages a painting from Basher’s 2017 show Hawaiian Tropic at Starkwhite, Auckland. Its hard-edged geometry speaks to modernist abstraction; its strobe-like light effects and surface gleam suggest retail-display fittings; its blinding light and hot colour palette are drawn from found photos of exotic landscapes. The original work translated these elements into painting. Untitled translates them back into digital form, closing the loop. Basher is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland; and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles. Andrew Beck (b.1987) Dissipative Structure 2020 Today, photography is digital and odourless. But, in the past, photographers worked their magic with light and smelly chemicals, processing film and prints in tanks and baths—‘wet photography’. Wellingtonian Andrew Beck’s pristine abstract photos look futuristic, even ‘digital’, yet are produced using old-school, analogue, wet techniques. Typically hybrids of photogram (cameraless photography) and painting (painted coloured-glass mattes), their clean geometries recall both early-modernist painting (particularly suprematism) and digital effects (like ‘flocking simulation’). Looking both to the future and the past, his works evade easy pigeonholing. Since 2015, Beck has also been making photograms of agitated water, by exposing sheets of photographic paper submerged in baths. These unique images register, in negative, the shadows cast by the liquid’s ripples and swirls— fleeting forms Beck can barely control. Originally made as ‘drawings’ to prompt ideas for new work, he has begun showing them as works in their own right. While they seem diametrically opposed to his trademark geometries, his Dissipative Structures reveal the basis and depth of his interest in light refraction and energy fields, while referring back to the chemical baths found in the darkroom of old—photography’s primal scene. Beck is represented by Visions, Auckland. Steve Carr (b.1976) Smoke Bubble 10 2016 Soap bubbles and wisps of smoke are stock motifs in vanitas still-life painting. Their fugitive qualities remind us of the brevity of life. In his 2016 series Smoke Bubbles, Steve Carr doubles down on death by combining them, photographing soap bubbles filled with cigarette smoke. He captures these evanescent entities against darkness, depriving them of any sense of scale. Carr’s spheres seem at once cloudy and iridescent, like unique and mysterious planets shrouded by their atmospheres. Time is one of Carr’s big themes. He is famous for making video works that explore duration, making us wait for a watermelon to explode or owers to change colour. But here, he grants permanence to an ephemeral beauty. Carr’s work featured in our 2016 show Bullet Time, and we presented his video installation Chasing the Light in 2019. Carr lives in Christchurch, where he is Senior Lecturer in Film at Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury. He is represented by Michael Lett, Auckland; and Station, Melbourne. Bronwyn Holloway-Smith (b.1982, Pākehā) Stoned_01 2020 Bronwyn Holloway-Smith explores national identity, public art, new technologies, and the power dynamics shaping knowledge and information. Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, she pursues these interests in her work and in other forums. Her work has featured in several City Gallery shows. For The Obstinate Object: Contemporary New Zealand Sculpture in 2012, she made models of other artists’ works in the show that could be downloaded and 3D printed. Her PhD project, The Southern Cross Cable: A Tour, starred in 2018’s This Is New Zealand. Here, her drawing (the first in a forthcoming series) refers to one of the first PC viruses, the ‘Stoned’ virus. Created by a young Wellington programmer in 1987, it spread quickly throughout Australasia, with variants springing up around the globe. Infected computers displayed the message ‘Your PC is now Stoned!’, along with the phrase ‘Legalise Marijuana’. Holloway-Smith’s highlighting of this story takes on a strange new relevance in a year marked by another sort of virus and a referendum on whether to legalise cannabis. Yona Lee (b.1986) In Transit (3D Pipes) 2020 Yona Lee’s snaking, maze-like installations of cut-and-welded stainless-steel pipes have been seen around the world, including presentations at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales (2018), Lyon Biennale (2019), and Busan Biennale (2020). In 2018, she made the fifth iteration of her In Transit project for City Gallery. It spread across two downstairs galleries and the auditorium corridor, tracing the movement of utility pipes.Her 3D computer-generated drawings initially served a preparatory function for her installations but have started to take on a life of their own. Following rather than preceding her sculptures, they now play out and rewrite the relationships her sculptures have to the body and spaces unrestricted by gravity or framing architecture. Continuing to push the possibilities of these digital drawings, she is currently investigating animating them. Lee lives in Auckland and is represented by Fine Arts, Sydney. Judy Millar (b.1957) Ears of a Donkey 2018 There was a time when painterly gestures seemed full of passionate intensity, yet today we tend to see them as conventional—signs of ‘expression’, tropes. Judy Millar wants to keep the baby and the bath water. Her paintings feel intensely physical and highly mediated. She famously ‘paints backwards’, using her hands to wipe paint off her canvases, creating springy exaggerated ‘brushstrokes’ that seem to float in illusionistic space. Here, she presents not a painting but a photo of her hand dripping gold paint. She originally made it as a ‘supplementary promo image’. Is it a quip about ‘the hand of the artist’ or her Midas touch? Millar was last seen at City Gallery back in 2007, in Prospect: New Art>New Zealand. Two years later, she represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale. These days Millar splits her time between Auckland and Berlin. She is represented by Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland; Robert Heald, Wellington; Nadene Milne Gallery, Christchurch; Sullivan and Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore; and Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich. Seung Yul Oh (b.1981) Pou Sto 2020 Seung Yul Oh’s improvisational approach to forms, materials, and spaces has made his work a fixture in galleries and museums in New Zealand and South Korea. He works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and video, animated by a sense of chaotic energy and play that often seeks audience participation. In 2014, City Gallery Wellington collaborated with Dunedin Public Art Gallery to stage Moamoa, a Decade, his first survey show. It included wall paintings, an inflatable labyrinth, and fake-noodle sculptures. Pou Sto belongs to Oh’s menagerie of creatures real and imagined, and specifically to a family of cute, cartoony mice. Oh often plays up the relationship between his mice and the viewer, knowing that even the most adoring viewer would likely recoil in horror if a real rodent darted across the floor. Here, he presents his mouse through a kind of photographic portrait. In ancient Greek, Pou Sto refers to the search for ‘a place to stand’—which is exactly what Oh’s creatures, art works, and audiences constantly negotiate with each other. Oh lives in Auckland and is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland. Fiona Pardington (b.1961, Ngāi Tahu, Kati Mamoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, and Clan Cameron of Erracht) Covid-19 Hand-Dug Bottle and a Piha Man O’ War: Nightwalking Level 4 2020 Fiona Pardington’s photography hinges on her mastery of her medium and her own mediumistic abilities. Her ongoing still-life project is alive to the range of forces present in images and objects she encounters in the world. Her ritualistic process is a form of sympathetic magic that starts with a daily salvaging of objects—many of which she nds washed up onto the beach and accepts as ‘gifts of Tangaroa’. This photograph emerges from one of Pardington’s night walks on Piha Beach during lockdown. Against a velvety black background, an ihumoana (stinging jellyfish) washed ashore sits in front of a glass bottle dug from the sand. Relating organic and inorganic, opacity and transparency, soft and hard, surreal and everyday, it offers a classic Pardington twist on the still life. This hypnagogic ‘message in a bottle’ is made at and for a time when the relationship between humans, the natural world, and the one we have built for ourselves has been thrown off its axis. In 2015, City Gallery staged Pardington’s survey exhibition A Beautiful Hesitation, which toured to Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery. The hero image was a lush still life, featuring salvaged bottles, roses, persimmons, and a colander teaming with ihumoana. Pardington lives in Piha and is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland. Elisabeth Pointon (b.1992) WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT AGAIN. 2020 In 2012, the art fair Art Basel Miami Beach commissioned ‘fifteen of the most seminal figures in text art’ to create text works to be flown behind aeroplanes. The line-up included just three women, and no one of colour. Jack Pierson’s banner reeked one-percenter privilege, declaring ‘WE’RE RICH WE CAN DO WHAT WE WANT’. Questioning who gets to speak, where, and how, Wellington-based Pākehā-Indian artist Elisabeth Pointon responded by flying her own banners bearing generic tongue-in-cheek taglines, including ‘SPECTACULAR.’ and ‘OUTSTANDING.’. (Her slogans always include a full stop—a ‘bindi’.) Pointon’s print shows her banner ‘BIG DEAL.’ flying over Auckland Art Fair on 4 May 2019. Pointon’s ‘SPECTACULAR.’, ‘OUTSTANDING.’, and ‘BIG DEAL.’ banners featured in her 2019 City Gallery show What Goes Up. They are part of her ongoing project, détourning the generic language of capitalist boosterism. Patrick Pound (b.1962) Reflectors 2020 Patrick Pound turns collecting into art, creating idiosyncratic ‘museums’— including Photography and Air, People Who Look Dead but (Probably) Aren’t, and The Museum of There, Not There. The two photos reproduced here featured in his 2018 City Gallery show On Reflection, a follow-up to his humbly titled 2017 show The Great Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne—the city he has called home for more than twenty years. On Reflection located doubles, doppelgängers, and mirrors in scores of found images and objects drawn both from Pound’s own collections and from Te Papa’s. The show was installed to mirror itself, like a giant Rorschach test. These photos—of a woman diving into water and a man poking his head out a window—were stand-ins for viewers reflecting on Pound’s algorithmic assemblage. Pound is represented by Hamish McKay, Wellington; Melanie Roger Gallery, Auckland; Station, Melbourne; and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. Jono Rotman (b.1974) Notorious Son Dog Reads King Notorious Roy RIP, Waipawa, MMXVIII 2018 There are few topics more polarising than gangs. Famously violent, New Zealand’s Mongrel Mob has always operated on the fringes of mainstream society. Most of its members are Māori, and many have been victims of state and family abuse. Gang life provides them with community and whanau. Part of New Zealand’s colonial legacy, the Mob has its own lore and iconography. Perversely, its totems include both the British bulldog and the Nazi swastika. Over many years, photographer Jono Rotman has documented Mob members and their own photos and talismans, culminating in his 2015 show Mongrel Mob Portraits at City Gallery and his 2018 book Mongrelism, with its suggestively redacted text. In this image, Notorious Son Dog, worldwide captain of Mongrel Mob Notorious, reads from the thirteenth bark of King Notorious Roy (RIP 2014) from Mongrelism. Son Dog wears the rings of other Mob hapu and one to represent MMMighty Henry battle wagons (Ford V8s). Originally from the Wellington region, Rotman now lives in San Francisco. He is represented by Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland. Yvonne Todd (b.1973) Alice Bayke (Outtake) 2002/2020 Auckland photographer Yvonne Todd is known for her studio portraits of imaginary female characters with invented names—wigged, costumed, made up. Often tainted with tragedy, her portraits prompt us to imagine her sitters’ back stories. The glamorous woman in Alice Bayke (Outtake) looks like she’s stepped out of Valley of the Dolls. The shot came from the sessions for Todd’s series Sea of Tranquility, made in 2002—the year she won the Walters Prize. Todd said she styled her models for this series like ‘the daughters of Mormon pastors, circa 1969’—the year of the moon landing. Bayke’s frosted wedding gown reminded one critic of the lunar surface—remote and airless. Sea of Tranquility featured in Todd’s City Gallery retrospective Creamy Psychology in 2014. She is represented by McLeavey Gallery, Wellington; Ivan Anthony, Auckland; and Fine Arts, Sydney. Jasmine Togo-Brisby (b.1982) Adrift Amidst the Middle Passage II 2019 Jasmine Togo-Brisby addresses the shameful history of the Pacific slavetrade (known as ‘blackbirding’). The Wellington artist is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander. As children, her great-great-grandparents were taken from Vanuatu and forced into domestic servitude in Sydney. She says: ‘I’m interested in examining the effects of trauma transmitted through ongoing oppression across generations, particularly in contrast to the inheritance of wealth that has come to those who benefit from slavery and colonisation.’ Here, her family photo shows three generations of women: the artist, her mother, and her daughter. Her mother wears a model sailing ship as a headdress, recalling the ships that carried her ancestors to Australia. Made using the antique collodion photographic process, the image has a nineteenth-century look. In 2017, City Gallery presented the show Colonial Sugar, placing Togo-Brisby’s work in conversation with Tracey Moffatt’s photo series Plantation. Togo-Brisby is represented by Page Galleries, Wellington. Co-ordinator Nicki ManthelCurators Robert Leonard and Aaron Lister

    • HILMA AF KLINT – Pioneer of abstract art an exhibition coup for New Zealand.
      • HILMA AF KLINT – Pioneer of abstract art anexhibition coup for New Zealand Startling paintings by Swedish artist rewrite modern art history City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi is thrilled to bring to New Zealand for the first time, Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings. The exhibition showcases an artist whose mysterious works —until recently little known—have captivated audiences and broken records for attendance worldwide, including major galleries such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where in 2019 it attracted the largest audience in the museum’s 60-year history. ‘City Gallery is honoured to host this extraordinary exhibition, introducing af Klint’s remarkable body of abstract and mystical paintings to New Zealand audiences,’ City Gallery Director Elizabeth Caldwell says. Af Klint began creating her most ambitious paintings in 1906. Some are huge in scale – unprecedented in her time – with radiant colour combinations, enigmatic symbols and other-worldly shapes. Influenced by spiritualist practices and scientific discoveries, af Klint saw herself as a receiver of messages from higher powers, which guided the creation of her work. She instructed her paintings be kept secret until 20 years after her death – convinced that the world was not yet ready to see her art. The eventual discovery of af Klint’s work has turned art history on its head. Remarkably, her first abstract paintings were made several years prior to those of her more famous male contemporaries Kasimir Malevich, Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian—artists commonly considered ‘the fathers of abstract art’. In an era of limited creative freedom for women artists, af Klint found a way to create an astonishing body of artwork unlike anything that had been seen before, which still has the capacity to surprise and astound us today. The exhibition features more than 100 paintings, including The Ten Largest – exuberantly colourful paintings that are a towering three-plus metres tall, through which the artist explores thefour stages of human development. Other major series from the artist’s Paintings for the Temple cycle will also be on show including The Swan and The Dove, which are filled with drama and symbolism. Caldwell says af Klint’s themes are highly relevant in today’s turbulent times. ‘The secret paintings were created not for fame or fortune, but to speak across time, to audiences of the future. Her exploration of humanity’s place in the cosmos resonates particularly during a global pandemic and the challenging issues we are experiencing today. An underlying theme of af Klint’s beautiful paintings is a drive toward harmony and interconnection, ideas that are pertinent for our time. Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings is supported by the Wellington City Council, Wellington NZ, and the City Gallery Wellington Foundation and is presented with the cooperation of The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm, in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. The exhibition has been curated by Sue Cramer, formerly Curator Heide Museum of Modern Art. It will also feature as part of the 2022 New Zealand Festival of the Arts. Wellington Mayor Andy Foster said the exhibition was coming at a time when globally af Klint is being recognised as a vital originator of abstract art and it will be a major drawcard for Wellington. Residents and visitors will enjoy a unique and stunning insight into the world of af Klint. ‘Her vision and message is represented with a scale and a perspective of colour and design that will inspire, for many, a new interpretation of modern art and the world around us.’ Other exhibition highlights are af Klint’s rarely seen early botanical watercolours; her experiments with the spiritualist group The Five; more than 30 abstract watercolours from the last decades of the artist’s life, several of which have never been exhibited in public before; and a selection of notebooks, which give fascinating insights into her influences and processes. Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings can be seen at City Gallery Wellington from 4 December 2021 to 27 March 2022 with tickets on sale soon. Visit hilma.citygallery.org.nz for more information. Note to editors; Images and captions can be found here: dropbox.com/sh/8d0t975zbmtgzzg/AAAMJBob5jM-uK_k0yBWtTKSa?dl=0 Tracking link to be used on digital channels: bit.ly/31oIkEm About the artistBorn in Stockholm in 1862, af Klint was one of the first women to study painting at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, graduating with honours in 1887. She established herself as a respected painter in Stockholm and, like many of her contemporaries, became deeply engaged with spiritualism, rosicrucianism and theosophy, which had a profound influence on her practice. In 1896, af Klint and four other like-minded women founded a spiritual group named The Five and studied esoteric texts, conducted séances, exercised automatic writing and mediumistic drawing. Following a traffic accident, af Klint died in the autumn of 1944, aged almost 82, leaving behind more than 1,300 rarely seen works and 124 notebooks. Her works have since been displayed in major museums in New York, London, Stockholm and São Paulo. The illustrated book Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings includes new writing by Sue Cramer (editor and exhibition curator), Nicholas Chambers, Jennifer Higgie, Julia Voss and City Gallery Wellington curator Aaron Lister. About City Gallery Wellington Te Whare ToiCity Gallery Wellington is a contemporary art gallery with a dynamic programme of exhibitions and events, and an international reputation. Located in Te Ngākau Civic Square, the Gallery is the hub for art-life in New Zealand’s capital. Media contact Anna Chalmers, Communications Manager, City Gallery WellingtonE: annac@experiencewellington.org.nz   

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