Abstract Arrangements

Over the coming months, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s exhibition team will be busy installing a new suite of exhibitions that will occupy the first-floor galleries over the summer months. The first of these is Abstract Arrangements, a focused exploration of shifting approaches to abstraction in Aotearoa New Zealand in the mid to late twentieth century, through works in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection. Located in the Wenita corridor, Abstract Arrangements traces the collapsing of representational form into hard-edged geometric abstraction. In doing so, the exhibition sets up a dialogue between artists whose work distorts or alters identifiable experiences and subjects and those who explore the potential of colour, shape, and mark-making in non-objective compositions.

Abstract Arrangements includes works by John Weeks, Bill Culbert, Louise Henderson, Gordon Walters, Colin McCahon, Elizabeth Stevens, Don Peebles, and Mervyn Williams, among others.


Noho ora mai
Lauren Gutsell
Kairauhī Curator
Dunedin Public Art Gallery

[Image: Mervyn Williams, Delta Series (Gyre), 1980, acrylic on canvas. Collection of Dunedin Public Art Gallery.]