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Frances Hodgkins and Morocco
Starting Date: Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Finishing Date: Sunday, 29 August 2010
This exhibition uses watercolours, contemporary photographs and the artist's letters to explore the four and a half months which Frances Hodgkins spent in Morocco in 1902–1903, and the influence of this adventure on her later career. The Dunedin art collectors, Mr and Mrs David Theomin, whose visit to Tangier coincided with Hodgkins's, are a second focus, for the exhibition includes the picture they commissioned from her and some of the artefacts they bought there, generously lent by Olveston.
Frances Hodgkins
Ayesha 1904
Watercolour on paper
Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery
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Jan van der Ploeg: Dignity
Starting Date: Saturday, 3 April 2010
Finishing Date: Sunday, 1 August 2010
April sees the welcome return to Dunedin of the Dutch painter Jan van der Ploeg, who will be producing a site-specific work for the Big Wall. A highly acclaimed figure in the contemporary art scene, van der Ploeg has established a significant reputation for producing dazzling wall drawings that respond to the unique nuances of architectural spaces, minimalist design and formal abstraction.
Jan van der Ploeg
Wall Painting No.216 Untitled 2007
Acrylic on wall
Image courtesy Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney
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Wayne Barrar: An Expanding Subterra
Starting Date: Saturday, 27 March 2010
Finishing Date: Sunday, 27 June 2010
A leading figure in New Zealand photographic circles, Wayne Barrar consistently challenges audiences to think about land use, place and borders in an increasingly controlled world. An Expanding Subterra brings together for the first time a body of work that Barrar has been working on for the last seven years. This project provides a timely insight into a highly industrialized and commodified underground, where vast areas are taken up storing data and nuclear waste, multinational organizations operate 24/7 and teams of workers continue to prospect for rare materials.
Wayne Barrar
Vehicle storage, Brady’s Bend, Pennsylvania, USA 2006
Colour pigment print
Image courtesy of the artist
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Cao Fei: Utopia
Starting Date: Saturday, 13 February 2010
Finishing Date: Sunday, 16 May 2010
One of the international stars of a new generation of Chinese artists, Cao Fei has garnered a reputation for producing highly seductive multi-media installations that respond to the manic pace and dizzying scale of urbanisation in her culture. The first solo exhibition of Cao Fei’s work in Australasia, Utopia is an opportunity for audiences to think about the excess and fantasy of our current social and economic condition.
RMB City, a recent work, was created by Cao Fei’s online identity China Tracy (with her platinum hair and suit of armour) on the Creative Commons Island of Kula. Named after Chinese money, RMB City shows a perverse view of Beijing—a blend of communism, socialism, and capitalism. Like Beijing itself, it is constantly under construction, candy-striped smoke stacks suggest continuous industrial production and ships move goods swiftly in and out of port. A giant shopping cart, filled with skyscrapers and religious monuments, floats nearby; and Tiananmen Square has been converted into a swimming pool.
A joint project by ARTSPACE Auckland and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
Cao Fei
RMB City: A Second Life City Planning by China Tracey 2007/9
Single channel video projection.
Image courtesy of the artist
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Heather Straka: The Asian
Starting Date: Saturday, 20 March 2010
Finishing Date: Sunday, 20 June 2010
The Asian is the first major solo exhibition by Heather Straka in a New Zealand public gallery. For this project Straka has commissioned a selection of artisans from Shenzhen, China to produce fifty high-end copies of one of her original ‘Asian Girl’ paintings. This promises to be an intriguing installation where ideas about the authentic and fake, truth and lie, original and copy are brought into question.
Heather Straka
The Asian 2009
Oil on canvas
Image courtesy of the artist
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Madeleine Child: Sweet As
Starting Date: Saturday, 13 February 2010
Finishing Date: Sunday, 18 April 2010
Recent co-joint winner of the prestigious Portage Award, Madeleine Child brings her lurid candy coloured ceramics to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Sweet As promises to be a playful installation of Child’s signature range of oversized and deliciously rococo popcorn.
Madeline Child
Sweet As
Ceramic
Image courtesy of the artist
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Albrecht Dürer and 16th Century German printmaking
Starting Date: Saturday, 26 June 2010
Finishing Date: Sunday, 8 August 2010
Albrecht Dürer is considered one of the greatest printmakers of all time, admired for his technical brilliance and innovation, and for his bold imaginative approach. His work was inspired by the social and religious upheavals of the Protestant Reformation, by classical stories, and by his own interpretation of Biblical texts.
Dürer bridged the gap between the Gothic tradition of art in northern Europe and the new ideas of the Renaissance in the south, and drew on both influences in his printmaking. In his woodcuts and engravings he used ‘dynamic calligraphy’ – complex combinations of curved lines that swelled and tapered, and defined light and shade, and surface texture. His system of cross-hatched lines convincingly depicted shape and form, giving the human body a sculptural quality.
This exhibition features 26 works from Albrecht Dürer and seven other distinguished German print makers.
Developed and presented by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Albrecht Dürer
The beast with two horns like a lamb
From: Apocalypse, 1497/98
woodcut
Purchased in 1971 with Harold Beauchamp Collection funds.
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