23 December through 21 January 2024
Below are some highlights from our summer hang, most of which you can see in the window if you are passing by…
Tony Lane Singing 2023 oil paint on gesso ground 1255 x 870mm $22,500
The paintings of Tony Lane resist casual interpretation; the work is complex, the symbols elusive. The elements in his paintings are a kind of shorthand or the artist’s concerns. There are recognisably New Zealand volcanic cones, mountain ranges, barren hills, and yet there are also distant echoes of early Italian primitivist art. Click here to read more about the artist.
Philippa Blair Rift 2005 oil on canvas 1215 x 760mm $12,500
Philippa Blair has been described as a traveller and a restless spirit, fluent in translating the tumultuous world around her into vibrant observations that are boldly autobiographical but also hum with the familiar rhythms of life. This cracker of a painting comes from her archive, created in 2005 when she was living in Los Angeles and thinking of Aotearoa. Click here to read more about the artist.
Kathy Barber Live Wire Shakedown (2023) Acrylic and oil glaze on linen $16,500
Kathy Barber’s paintings are palimpsests. Canvases are built gradually through multiple layers of transparent glazes. Their contents altered, effaced, reimagined so that the origin of the work – be it a place, a memory, a thought – remains only in traces, visible in the margins, like a shadow – an echo. Click here to read more about the artist.
Richard McWhannell The Bay View (2022) oil on canvas 455 x 610mm $8,000
Richard McWhannell’s paintings are places where drama and enigma intersect, but also places that offer great calm and beauty. His practice encompasses portraiture, landscape, allegory, surrealism and satire – sometimes simultaneously. Click here to read more about the artist.
Peter James Smith Sterling Falls, oil glaze on linen 310 x 210mm $1,800
Peter James Smith’s paintings take their inspiration from the natural world, including some of Aotearoa’s most iconic and dramatic places, drawing on mathematics, cartography, history and poetry to describe them. Click here to read more about the artist.
Leigh Christensen Beaked Figure hand carved single branch of Totara 1700mm tall $16,000
Leigh Christensen is an Auckland based sculptor with a post-graduate diploma from Elam Art School (Te Hoi Hau multi-disciplinary). Leigh studied traditional carving with northern Maori master carver Alan Nopera in the early eighties and his work successfully and respectfully fuses both Maori and European carving techniques.
Johnny Turner Homage to the Koru (2023) polished black granite approx 450mm high $28,000
Johnny Turner’s respect for the intrinsic language of stone means his works are in sympathy with the material, there is a sense of a partnership, a mutual understanding. This piece, a modernist interpretation of a koru referencing both Hepworth and Moore, is a fine example. An artist page and quality photographs of Turners work are on the way. In the meantime, for more information about the artist, please contact us.