Heather Straka set to release new screen print

At the opening of The Asian at Page Blackie Gallery on Tuesday evening (29th May), Heather Straka will be releasing a new silk screen print to celebrate the successful conclusion of the nationwide tour of her monumental installation.
The prints measure 800 x 600 mm (paper size) and are $1500, unframed .
To secure an edition of this screen print, contact the Gallery.

Hemi Macgregor exhibition at University of Waikato

Remix: Works by Hemi Macgregor 
14 May - 22 June 2012
University of Waikato, Calder & Lawson Gallery

Remix presents a survey of Hemi Macgregor's work, spanning a period 15 years. Working across painting, sculpture and mixed media this exhibition showcases Hemi's "dynamic art practice that mixes issues of contemporary youth culture with Maori concepts of knowledge, time and identity".

The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful catalogue featuring an essay by Megan Tamati-Quennell.

Neil Dawson - orange zone

Emily Wolfe - New Paintings

Jensen Downes Picture Company presents "Station"

World Press Masterclass nominee photographer Tim J. Veling presents his perspective of the film, Station, with a release of limited edition photographs.

Each photograph is available in three sizes:

$950 for 22" x 27.5" (edition of 3 at this size)
$450 for 10" x 12.5" (edition of 5 at this size)
$135 for 5" x 6.25" (edition of 10 at this size)

To view all of Tim J. Veling's works click HERE.

Contact the Gallery if you wish to purchase, some editions are near selling out, so be quick!

Heather Straka Exhibition Opens

Heather Straka's exhibition Playdate is now on at Page Blackie Gallery. Join us for a glass of wine from 5.30pm this evening to celebrate the show opening.

For more information on this exhibition please contact the Gallery.

Heather Straka - PLAYDATE

Dick Frizzell, Yellow

We are in the last week of Dick Frizzell's exhibition Painting the Hunt.
As part of his collaboration with Sam Hunt, Frizzell has produced a limited edition lithograph titled Yellow.

Dick Frizzell
Yellow, 5/60, 2011
Lithograph
760 x 565 mm
Signed, dated and editioned below
$1,200

Contact the Gallery for further details.

Poetry in a new light

By Sarah Catherall

Take one of New Zealand's best-known artists and pair him up with one of our iconic poets and the result is a range of unique artworks that celebrate both their talents.

Since splashing Sam Hunt's poems over canvas, Dick Frizzell is now moved to tears when he reads his new friend's poems, which is an interesting confession for an expressionist pop artist who admits he's never been keen on poetry.

"I avoided it at school. I always thought, 'Poetry, poetry, what the f... is poetry'?," he laughs."But I've been converted to Sam's poetry. It's funny, when you spend a lot of time working with them, I can now hardly quote them without choking. They are so profound."

Frizzell's light-filled studio on the edge of the Haumoana shoreline is filled with art and graphic design books rather than literature.

But the Hawke's Bay painter pulls out one book that has consumed many of his hours over the past year – a complete collection of Hunt's poems. Frizzell has always been restless to produce new works and to challenge himself with new projects, and when The Dominion Post visited his home, the result of that energy graced his studio walls. An exhibition of Frizzell's efforts, Painting the Hunt, has just begun at Paige Blackie Gallery in Wellington.

But Frizzell and Hunt's collaboration only came about by chance. About three years ago, an advertising agency approached the artist about creating a new Kiwi icon for giant billboards similar to Frizzell's famous Four Square man.

That idea didn't take off, until one of the creatives came up with the idea of Frizzell painting a Hunt poem. Frizzell was also keen to capture the Kiwi spirit, rather than an image.
Read More

Sam Hunt performing in Page Blackie Gallery

Karl Maughan - The Language of Flowers

Written by Sarah Catherall

For an artist who is renowned for painting splendid rhododendrons and gardens exploding with colour, Karl Maughan knows surprisingly little about flowers and plants. In fact, the Auckland home he shares with his partner, novelist Emily Perkins, and three children, is almost colourless. Green natives are dotted about, amid a cluster of sunflowers and cornflowers. "But it's a very green garden," he says.

Maughan is one of our most prolific artists who hasn't deviated from the flowers and gardens he has become renowned for, which he has been painting for almost 25 years since he graduated from art school.

His surrealist fantasy landscapes grace the walls of galleries in New Zealand and overseas, and they have increased in value over the years, now fetching more than $55,000 for large ones that fill walls.

His newest work is on show at Wellington's Page Blackie Gallery. Maughan is a towering 1.9 metres (6ft 3in) tall and wearing casual shorts and a comfortable T-shirt when we meet. He wouldn't look out of place in a garden, although you would expect to see him with a hoe in his hand rather than a paint brush. However, when he paints, he works off photographs of gardens.

That wasn't always the case. Until he shifted to London in the early 1990s, Maughan tried to paint in gardens, but the inclement weather and conditions forced him to his East End studio, and he is more comfortable painting inside today.

Read more here

Dick Frizzell - Painting the Hunt

Harry Watson: That Was Then, This Is Now

An exhibition of past and recent work by Page Blackie Gallery Artist Harry Watson is now on at Aratoi Museum of Art and History, Wairarapa.

Harry creates animal, feathered and human protagonists (often based on real historical figures) that often recreate their dramas against the backdrop of a fledgling colonial society. Melding Maori and Pakeha techniques and traditions, Harry explores the social history and politics of Aoteroa in ways that are at once quirky and thought-provoking.

Harry Watson: That Was Then, This Is Now runs at Aratoi Museum of Art and History, Wairarapa until the 11th of March 2012.

Karl Maughan exhibition opening - Tuesday 6th Dec

Karl Maughan's new exhibition opens tomorrow evening from 5:30pm. Come along and meet the artist. And in the meantime, contact the Gallery for further details.

Dick Frizzell: Images in an artist's heart

There are some surprises in Frizzell's choice of paintings, writes Peter Simpson

Book review: It's All About The Image by Dick Frizzell (Godwit $65)

It's hard to avoid Dick Frizzell these days; whether it is paintings or wine or T-shirts or books or items on TV and in magazines - he is all over the place. Perhaps he is this generation's equivalent of what Peter McIntyre was in the post-war decades, an artist with a popular style who parlayed his popularity into a range of other activities such as best-selling books.

As it happens, McIntyre has a role to play in Frizzell's latest venture, a collection of 100 of his favourite New Zealand paintings. In his chatty introduction he recalls as a lad in Hawke's Bay watching McIntyre working on a mural in the Hastings War Memorial Library.

"He painted some small rocks on the desert sand at the feet of the soldiers and, with what seemed like just a couple of brushstrokes, he rendered the texture of the rock, the sun on the rock, the reflected light on the shady side of the rock, and the shadow of the rock on the sand. The entire universe right there. With a brush and some paint, I've been trying to be that clever ever since."

McIntyre's kind of art has long been out of favour with many sophisticated art followers, but that is no barrier to his being lauded by Frizzell who revels in the manifestations of popular culture which he has so successfully appropriated for his own art.

Frizzell's favourites include a fair number of artists who are not now rated highly by the experts, such as Cedric Savage, Nugent Welsh, Archibald Nicoll and Austen Deans - all landscape painters it may be noted, a style of art that Frizzell has done a good deal to rehabilitate through his own accomplished practice (though landscape is far from being his only mode). Read More

Israel Birch opens new exhibition Ara-i-te-uru at City Gallery Wellington

Ara-i-te-uru

26 November 2011 - 12 February 2012 in the Deane Gallery

In te ao Māori (the Māori worldview) myth and actuality are a tangled tale. Often difficult to reconcile in contemporary times, elements of te ao tipua (the supernatural world) continue to be central to the beliefs of many Māori communities today. In recent decades such beliefs have become a source of confusion creating tension between customary expectations and contemporary sensibilities.

Ara-i-te-uru is a major new sculptural installation by artist Israel Tangaroa Birch which looks at these intersections between mythology and ideology, where legend becomes legacy. Referencing some of the major collaborative works created by Ralph Hotere and Bill Culbert, such as Aramoana–Pathway to the Sea (1991) and Blackwater (1999), Birch uses light and shadow to explore relationships between things in the physical world of te ao mārama (the world of light) and their metaphysical counterparts in te pō (the world of darkness). Read more

'One Hand' explores the world of Zen Buddhism

By Kurt Shaw, PITTSBURG TRIBUNE REVIEW

The forth exhibit in the Andy Warhol Museum's Word of God Series, Max Gimblett's 'The Sound of One Hand' brings to focus the world of Zen Buddhism.

An artist living and working in New York City since 1972, Gimblett has been focuing on Buddhisim since 1965 when he first encountered pet and novelist Kenneth Patchen's (1911-1972) painted "picture poems" in San Francisco.

"It has never been the main focus," Gimblett, 75, says, admittedly "sharing my interests equally with Jungian studies and the history of visual art, particularly painting." But a serious interest in Buddhism was so much a draw that, "I took my vows in 2006 and am a lay monk of Rinzai Buddhism."That goes a long way in explaining why the works on view have an overall zen-like quality, especially the earlier brushworks on paper that date as far back as the 1980s. Here, the work is distinctly divided into two types -- enso and koan paintings.

Simple ink brush drawings of circles on rice paper, the enso pieces are a good place to start in terms of entering Gimblett's world. Enso is a Japanese word meaning "circle" and is a concept strongly associated with Zen. "Enso is a common subject of Japanese calligraphy, symbolizing the universe, strength and Enlightenment," Gimblett says. "Typically drawn in one stroke with a thick paintbrush, the enso represents absolute reality and the void in Zen art."

Gimblett says that some artists will paint enso daily, "as a kind of spiritual diary." Enso is usually created on silk or rice paper. "The single stroke does not allow for any modification -- the brushed circle represents the spirit of the moment of creation," he says. "In the circle nothing stops, nothing comes to an end, it just keeps going."Read more:

Ngatai Taepa - COLOUR, VALUE & PERSPECTIVE

Ngatai Taepa's new exhibition Colour, Value and Perspective opens on Tuesday (8 November) at Page Blackie Gallery. Contact the Gallery for further details.

Responding to the Urewera Raids - Te Manawa

"This work appears to have a strong base in Tuhoe stories, but part of its success is its ability like more traditional Maori patternmaking to open out in abstraction from a strong kernel to the universal. The title comes from a beautiful Tuhoe battle whakatauki (proverb): ‘He iti na Tuhoe, e kata te po'. One interpretation is, ‘No matter how small Tuhoe are, their laughter will be heard through the night'."

Click here to read Mark Amery's excellent review of Hemi Macgregor, Saffronn Te Ratana and Ngataiharuru Taepa's collaborative work recently shown at Te Manawa in Palmerston North

Paul Dibble gifts large Huia to Palmerston North

Paul Dibble has gifted a final work to Palmerston North before he contemplates a shift up north. As stated in the Manawatu Standard, Ghost of the Huia is a 2.5m sculpture of a female Huia, in bronze, perched on a ring of Corten steel. The steel ring has a light patina of rust, which will slowly deepen as the steel weathers. Dibble created the sculpture about 10 years ago, and had promised it to the city. He felt now was the right time to have it installed, and it has been proudly positioned in The Square near The Square edge. Dibble says of the Huia, "It was a lovely bird. There's a statement here about if you want things of beauty, you have to be prepared to look after them."