Auckland City Art

Auckland Museum has joined forces with some of the biggest names in New Zealand music, including Tiki Taane, Nathan Haines and Don McGlashan, to work on a project called Sonic Museum, for a series of exclusive new music tracks. Musicians and sound artists from the dance, rock, ambient, orchestral and jazz scenes have been commissioned to write and record a track that interprets a gallery of their choice in the museum. Galleries include the World War II Hall of Memories, Ancient Worlds, the Oceans Gallery and Maori Court.
 

"In 1969 when I was working on a book on Maori tattooing, I at last met Marti at that year's Labour Party conference in Wellington. She had not long before photographed Rauwha Tamaiparea at Parihaka, in the company of Dick Scott, and she showed me some of those prints. I was overwhelmed with admiration. These were precisely the kinds of photos I had hoped to have for my own book. So I asked her if she would photograph other kuia moko for me, for what would become, for each of us, our first major publication."

In colours commissioned especially from the glitter manufacturer Dear Beauty, Dear Beast, is a handsome show of new paintings by Reuben Paterson. The series began for Paterson as a reaction to New Zealand's provocation debate. In the way that previous bodies of work have honoured his whakapapa and found basis in the emotional responses to his genealogy, Paterson views these works, in part, as a personal homage to the victims of murder cases which have successfully used the provocation or "gay panic" defence. 

The work suggests that in the same way that we have an underlying culture of racism, there is also an underlying culture of homophobia.

Auckland born, Felix Kelly (1914-1994) fled New Zealand as a young man for the bright lights of London. He never returned, but, unlike other New Zealand expatriate painters who quickly removed their homeland from their subject matter, Kelly kept painting an increasingly misremembered New Zealand which with each new work became a more and more fantastical place.

Kelly established himself as a graphic designer in 1930s London before moving seamlessly into stage and interior design in the 1950s. All this time he was also establishing himself as a painter of note. Initially exhibiting alongside Lucian Freud and Julian Trevelyan – and on one occasion Frances Hodgkins – Kelly soon developed a romantic, surreal style entirely his own, and cultivated a rich, upper-class clientele whom he supplied with house portraits, straight or strange as they preferred. In this his career bore a startling resemblance to that of Charles Ryder in the Evelyn Waugh novel, Brideshead Revisited.

Life has been full of journeys for Pippa Blake, and now she is using canvas to tell the story. An exhibition of her paintings, called Journey, is on at the Louis Vuitton store on Queen St.

The fine arts graduate and accomplished painter has been hard at work in London for the past six years completing a post-graduate fine arts course. She says this exhibition is a collection of pieces from different series, all linked by the common thread of journeys, both literal and metaphorical. 

Barbarian In the Garden is taken from the title of a collection of travel writings by Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, made on sporadic shoe-string excursions around Western Europe during the post-Stalinist thaw of the 1960s. Hotel Polonia refers to a hotel in the centre of Warsaw where Kazimir Malevich exhibited as part of a short retrospective tour which gained him European, and eventually international, recognition. These were to be his last shows before being forced to return to the Soviet Union and witness the change in the authorities' attitudes towards his and other Modernist art that he had predicted after Lenin's death. For this reason he also attempted to arrange permanent residency for himself in Poland based on his Polish ethnicity. The original, Polish, spelling of the name 'Malewicz' resonates strongly for Malone with the Polish verb 'to paint' - malować (both 'cz' and ć producing subtle variations on the English 'ch' sound).

You can find the Sue Crockford Gallery at: Suite 2C Endeans Building, 2 Queen Street, Auckland CBD.

A ‘Singing Cloud’ made up of 4000 microphones, love letters staged as political protests, sailing, surfing, birds flying, performance, an eco-friendly home and over 20 works newly commissioned to fit the theme…and that’s just a taste of New Zealand’s leading international contemporary art exhibition the 4th Auckland Triennial, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon.

This year, after 3 years in the making, you will be the first in the world to see works that have been especially created for the Triennial, as well as a range of contemporary art from around the world. Presented by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki with Auckland Triennial Partner AUT University and in association with exhibition partners Artspace, St Paul St and The George Fraser Gallery.

In his most recent work, the series Cell, Curtis adopts as his light source the cool white glow of cellphones, illuminating the faces of young women at night in clubs and bars as they send text messages, absorbed, in private pools of light against blurred dark and neon backgrounds. However, as Sean Payne notes, the gaze of these images, while voyeuristic, is not menacing but evokes the "lonely disconnection that can come upon us in a crowded nightclub...the sense that we are somehow separated from the world we observe".