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Meg Cranston: The Pleasure of Obvious Problems
Starting Date: Saturday, 1 December 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 30 March 2008
The Pleasure of Obvious Problems is the first survey exhibition of the work of Californian artist Meg Cranston. The exhibition title reflects Cranston’s theory about art. “Art makes abstract concepts tangible. It makes problems, love or death or power or whatever it is, it makes those issues visible. The best art makes complex ideas obvious. That’s the pleasure of art”.
The exhibition includes a selection of Cranston’s work in sculpture, performance and mixed media installation, spanning her twenty-year career (1987- 2007). It also includes new works created especially for the exhibition.
Exhibition organized and toured by Artspace.
Meg Cranston
An installation view of The Complete Works of Jane Austen 1991 Vinyl balloon (detail)
Collection of Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann. Photograph by Alex North, courtesy of the artist and ARTSPACE
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Laurence Aberhart
Starting Date: Saturday, 15 September 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 2 December 2007
This major exhibition of one of New Zealand’s most eminent photographers brings together over 200 key works from the last four decades—among them his signature images of landscapes, facades, monuments, and interiors from New Zealand, Australia and further afield. Using a 100 year old view camera, Aberhart produces images which are steeped in the history not only of his subjects but also of his chosen medium. This exhibition asserts Laurence Aberhart's place as a key figure in New Zealand culture and a photographer of international significance.
Laurence Aberhart is a City Gallery Wellington touring exhibition and was developed in association with Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Principal Sponsor Ernst & Young.
Laurence Aberhart
Albatross (Bird Skins Room #6), Taranaki St,
Wellington, 3 October 1995.
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The Secret Life of Paint
Starting Date: Saturday, 26 May 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 26 August 2007
This new exhibition offers a journey under, around and through paint. What’s a painting made of? What’s it like to get under one’s skin? What happens when you rob painting of its standard tools and props?
Among the answers on show here are a machine that paints, an artist who uses his body as a brush, big blooming brushes created from mops, and a huge paintball peeled back to show the rainbow layers underneath. Featuring work by Guy Benfield, Graham Fletcher, Simon Ingram, Denise Kum, Judy Millar, Julia Morison, Michael Morley, Miranda Parkes, Seung Yul Oh, Daniel von Sturmer and Rohan Wealleans.
A Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition
Judy Millar
Working the Green
2003
Oil and acrylic on canvas.
Collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery
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Salla Tykkä: Cave and Zoo
Starting Date: Saturday, 19 May 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 15 July 2007
Finnish artist Salla Tykkä’s works explore moments of emotional and physical transformation experienced by young women in a combination of natural (landscape) and constructed (suburban, urban) settings. The situations are intentionally ambiguous, highly charged emotionally and sexually, and utilise cinematic devices in order to heighten tension.
Exhibition initiated and toured by City Gallery Wellington, with the support of FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange.
Salla Tykkä
still from Cave (detail) 2003
35mm film transferred
Courtesy of the artist
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The Grand Tour: Works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Collection
Ongoing Exhibition
Furniture, ceramics, sculpture, paintings and works on paper will be combined to evoke the aesthetics of an English 18th century interior and highlight the intellectual and aesthetic interests of 18th century collectors and designers.
The exhibition features works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s permanent collection, including paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Allan Ramsay and Sir Joshua Reynolds, in addition to Adam and Chippendale style period furniture.
Richard Cosway
Pan and Syrinx (detail)
Watercolour
Collection of the Dunedin Public Art
Gallery
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Another View: Photographs from the Seresin Family Collection
Starting Date: Saturday, 31 March 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 13 May 2007
Another View offers a rare opportunity to see some of the most famous images in photographic history in the original black and white print format. The photographers include some of the best-known names from early to mid-20th century, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Eugene Atget, Josef Sudek, W. Eugene Smith, Bill Brandt, Mario Giacomelli and G.H. Brassai.
This collection provides an intensely beautiful encapsulation of modernist photography’s key styles.
Exhibition courtesy of the Seresin Family, organised by Cressida Bishop and the Millennium Art Gallery, Blenheim. Toured by Exhibition Services Ltd.
E. J. Bellocq
Untitled [Prostitute, Storyville, New Orleans]
c.1911-13
from Another View: Photographs from the
Seresin Family
Collection
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Simon Denny
Starting Date: Saturday, 31 March 2007
Finishing Date: Monday, 4 June 2007
Simon Denny recombines humble materials in precarious, witty and poetic ways. His show Old Things in Auckland last year was an ebullient obstacle course of hung, draped and leaned forms, prompting critic Tessa Laird to call Denny one of Auckland’s ‘rampant young maximalists’. He's also an artist with a light touch, whose recent works include 'abstracts' held to the wall by nothing more than static electricity, and constructions that teeter elegantly on the brink of collapse. Most recently featured in Prospect 2007 at City Gallery Wellington, Denny is the first of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's Visiting Artists for 2007. The Visiting Artists Programme is supported by Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa.
Simon Denny
Untitled (Blue Fish)
2006
plastic tablecloth,
woollen blanket, static electricity
Courtesy the artist and Michael
Lett, Auckland
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Given: Jewellery by Warwick Freeman
Starting Date: Saturday, 28 April 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 26 August 2007
For over twenty years Warwick Freeman has been making jewellery that speaks about the complexities of living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Prominent amongst a number of self-taught jewellers who revolutionised contemporary jewellery practice in Aotearoa in the 1980s, Freeman is unique in his continued questioning of cultural identity and jewellery practice. As this selection of 35 works illustrates, nothing is taken for granted in Freeman’s work. Given showcases the output of a maker who has rigorously asked difficult questions about the politics, aesthetics and finally ethics of jewellery in a colonial/settler society like Aotearoa New Zealand.
Warwick Freeman
Insignia series of brooches
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Reuben Paterson: When the Sun Rises and the Shadows Flee
Starting Date: Saturday, 28 April 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 11 November 2007
Part retro billboard, part South Pacific fantasy, part cultural tribute, When the Sun Rises and the Shadows Flee is one of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s major acquisitions of 2006. Well known for his glitter paintings, Reuben Paterson says, “whenever something shimmers, we go to it”. Here he expands his trademark specks of glitter to a scale he calls “God-sized”.
An evocation of life’s journey toward the home of Hinenuitepo, the Goddess of Death, this wall of blue sky and black silhouetted palm trees is at once a celebration of life and a reminder of our mortality.
Reuben Paterson
When the Sun Rises and the Shadows Flee 2005
acrylic, shimmer disks on board, industrial fan
Collection Dunedin
Public Art Gallery
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Frances Hodgkins: Earthly Pleasures
Starting Date: Saturday, 28 April 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 30 September 2007
Frances Hodgkins: Earthly Pleasures takes its cue from the many paintings and drawings by Frances Hodgkins that have food, flowers and gardens - the fruits of the earth - as their subject matter. It is clear from the artist's letters that, despite periods of privation, she took great pleasure in the sensory experiences offered by delicious food and beautiful gardens and delighted in the inspiration they offered her.
A Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition.
Frances Hodgkins
Flowers and a Cat 1941
Gouche on paper
Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery
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Madonna to Modern: Women of the Collection
Ongoing Exhibition
How has the concept of ‘woman’ been depicted over the centuries?
Has it changed or stayed the same?
Spanning five hundred years of history, Madonna to Modern presents favourite and unseen paintings and prints that explore the idea of feminine beauty and the virtues and values a woman represents.
The exhibition opens with a fifteenth century Madonna and ends with Rita Angus’s self-portrait of herself as the quintessential modern woman.
A Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition
Master of Miniato
Madonna and Child with Pomegranate c.1490 Tempera and gold on wood
Collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Gifted in 1955 by Archdeacon F.H.D. Smythe
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Creed
Starting Date: Saturday, 28 July 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 2 September 2007
Creed, the complementary exhibition to Cream: European Paintings from the Collection, presents some of the most significant contemporary paintings in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s collection. It pays homage to a group of artists, including Colin McCahon, Ralph Hotere and Toss Woollaston, whose art and beliefs have laid the foundation for modern art in New Zealand. Creed invites viewers to make a leap of faith, from the figurative world of the ‘old masters’ to the often-abstract and highly personal world of their modern equivalents.
A Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition
Don Driver
Yellow Tentacle Pram 1980
plastic, steel, oil paint, rubber
Collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery
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James Robinson: Maker
Starting Date: Saturday, 16 June 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 29 July 2007
James Robinson is a Dunedin artist renowned for turbulent expressionist paintings. Critic David Eggleton has described the works as 'a testimony to modern life as a chapter of accidents, where menace mingles with grief, and aggression with abjection ... beautiful, harsh, and weirdly heroic'. In this artist's project, he surrounds viewers with densely worked, freehanging canvases that thrive with signs of anxious life and evoke close encounters between ‘self and place’.
A Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition.
James - rusty number 8 wire - rock n pillar range Photo by Manu
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Paul Cullen: Falsework
Starting Date: Saturday, 11 August 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 7 October 2007
'Falsework' is the name given to the temporary structures that support a building while it is under construction and which are removed once it is complete. In this project sculptor Paul Cullen assembles some pieces of 'falsework' in which practical functions give way to poetic and metaphorical possibilities. Inspired in part by hand-made structures seen in an eighteenth-century Dutch planetarium, Cullen's home-built but elegant sculptures bring together common materials in uncommon and often gravity-defying ways.
A Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition.
Paul Cullen
Model for the antigravity roomfirst version
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Rob Mcleod: No Stop. No Pause. No Fast Forward.
Starting Date: Saturday, 28 July 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 25 November 2007
High-intensity colour and a profusion of jostling, cartoony shapes characterise Rob McLeod's recent paintings. Featuring an array of works produced during McLeod's 2005 William Hodges Fellowship in Southland, the exhibition No Stop. No Pause. No Fast Forward. demonstrates this veteran New Zealand artist's continuing appetite for paintings that push his medium and its supports to their limits.
A Southland Museum and Art Gallery Touring Exhibition.
Rob Mcleod
Defence Force 2005
oil on plywood
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Subjects to Hand: Joanna Margaret Paul Drawing
Starting Date: Saturday, 15 September 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 18 November 2007
This exhibition presents a selection of more than 70 exquisite drawings and short films by the late Joanna Margaret Paul. Over nearly four decades, using the simplest of drawing materials and looking no further than her physical surroundings, Paul accumulated a body of work brimming with graphic invention and poetic observation.
Toured by Mahara Gallery, Waikanae.
Joanna Margaret Paul
Untitled (still life with roses) 1994
Pencil and
gouache
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Frances Hodgkins in Town and Country
Starting Date: Saturday, 13 October 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 13 April 2008
Frances Hodgkins in Town and Country explores Frances Hodgkins' views and experiences of towns - particularly those in Europe and Morocco - and suggests evolutions in her relationship with the countryside and its inhabitants. In addition to artworks, items such as letters and photographs illuminate her insights of the urban and natural environments she explored in her life and work.
A Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition.
Frances Hodgkins
Dordrecht c.1908
Watercolour
Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery
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Goes Nowhere Like a Rainbow: Steve Carr
Starting Date: Saturday, 20 October 2007
Finishing Date: Saturday, 16 February 2008
New work by Dunedin-trained Auckland-based artist Steve Carr. Filled with Carr's trademark whimsical humour and lightness of approach, Goes Nowhere Like a Rainbow uses video and exquisite sculptures in blown glass to explore the tension between comfort and danger, security and fragility. By making objects as familiar as logs of firewood from a material as vulnerable and elegant as glass, Carr creates beautifully brittle trophies of ordinary life.
With support from Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa.
Steve Carr
An installation view of Goes Nowhere Like a Rainbow
Courtesy of the artist.
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Sigmar Polke: Music from an Unknown Source
Starting Date: Saturday, 15 December 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 2 March 2008
This is an extraordinary opportunity to see a rich array of works on paper by one of Germany's foremost contemporary artists, the internationally renowned Sigmar Polke. Since the early 1960s Polke has been making paintings that sample freely from painting's history, and blend seemingly incompatible effects and images in rich and provocative ways. In these forty gouaches from 1996, Polke contrasts the drip and flow of watery paint with his signature 'screen' of printer's dots, extending his career-long exploration of the space between creativity and control, imagination and order.
The exhibition is organised by Germany's Institut for Cultural Relations, ifa, and is toured by the Goethe-Institut.
Sigmar Polke
According to Statistics every German owns 10,000 things
1996
Gouache.
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Eion Stevens: A Stage Set for a Poem
Starting Date: Saturday, 8 December 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 24 February 2008
In A Stage Set for a Poem Eion Stevens plays with poems by leading New Zealand poets including Katherine Mansfield, Cilla McQueen, C.K. Stead and Lauris Edmond.
In his distinctive way Stevens presents personal symbols and icons as props that evoke the imaginative world of the poets. In response to Cilla McQueen’s Axis, Stevens unveils how “fern fronds punch” and, inspired by Ruth Dallas’s Shadow Show, he gives us a “birdsclaw foothold on the earth”. But the poets also perform for the painter, as Emma Neale, John O’Connor, James Norcliffe and Kevin Ireland present poems that have been inspired by one of Stevens’s paintings.
Eion Stevens
stage set (for a poem by Ian Wedde)
2001
Oil on board.
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Douglas Kelaher: Play Nice
Starting Date: Saturday, 22 December 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 24 February 2008
Installed in a light-filled space overlooking the Octagon, Kelaher’s Play Nice is a landscape of cartoonish figures and forms - part playground, part toybox, part Surrealist sculpture garden. Kelaher likens the scene to the set for a children’s television programme, but one in which the children direct the events and invent the plot. The outward look of Play Nice is cheerful, happy and harmonious (Kelaher has based many of his forms on what child development specialists call ‘empathy objects’) but there’s lots of room within this exhibition for hands-on intervention and mischievous juxtapositions.
A Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition.
Image courtesy of the artist.
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Elizabeth Thomson: My Hi-fi My Sci-fi
Starting Date: Saturday, 15 December 2007
Finishing Date: Sunday, 6 April 2008
Elizabeth Thomson is fascinated with the formal qualities and imaginative potentials she finds in nature. The material she uses—blown glass, bronze, zinc, beading, fiberglass—draw the viewer closer to the works, with their hard and soft surfaces, roughness and smoothness, opacity and transparency. Thomson’s paradoxical works inhabit both wall-and-air space. Balancing observation and imagination, organisation and invention, order and adventure, her art is an eloquent exploration of both a state of mind and the state of the natural world.
Exhibition initiated and toured by City Gallery Wellington.
Elizabeth Thomson
The Black and Whites 2007 (detail). Bronze, patina, casein, oil based pigment. Courtesy of the artist.
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Peter Wegner: Terra Firma Incognita
Starting Date: Saturday, 15 December 2007
Finishing Date: Saturday, 7 June 2008
Entering the gallery foyer, the viewer encounters a massive wall of circles. The circles fill the two-story ‘big wall’. As the viewer approaches, it becomes apparent that each circle is an enlarged detail taken from a map. In this new map, the countries and continents of the world have been atomized, isolated and radically reconfigured. A piece of Madagascar now abuts a section of Texas as well as a stretch of New Zealand beach, an expanse of sub-Saharan desert and foothills of the Italian Alps. Whether these fragments of map are drifting closer together or farther apart is impossible to say. They appear to have been caught in a moment of transition, on their way from something charted and known to something else entirely: terra firma incognita.
Peter Wegner is the second of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's Visiting Artists for 2007. The Visiting Artists Programme is supported by Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa.
Peter Wegner
Concept proposal for Terra Firma Incognita
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Christine Webster: Blindfield
Starting Date: Saturday, 15 December 2007
Finishing Date: Thursday, 31 January 2008
A video installation by Christine Webster, Blindfield probes ideas about perceived ‘madness’, in particular in relation to women and hysteria. Until quite recently primitive treatments such as ECT were used even when there was no proof of its ability to cure: Blindfield refers to the complex and often uneasy ways in which human communities control and maintain ‘the others’ who fall outside of the status quo. Webster uses video imagery as a vehicle for exploring the gap between the individual and the inevitable momentum of a society which doesn’t listen; the kind of slippage which occurs and allows some individuals to fall through.
Christine Webster
Blindfield: Julia (i) Film still.
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