For four days only from 21–28 March, Orexart presents the work of one of Aotearoa’s most creative thinkers.
A sample of the more than one hundred captains painted in oils on Beehive matchboxes. Each signed and numbered enverso.
Mikhail Gherman is best known for his quirky, attention grabbing campaigns for the global Karen Walker brand, but his creative journey in Aotearoa began in the 1980s at Elam School of Fine Arts, where he majored in painting and design.
Gherman was inspired to pick up painting again during lockdown so it may be said this exhibition is the result of 40 years of creative gestation and four years of labour.
The Captains Series is a collision of some of the artist’s perennial obsessions: outsiders, junkshop art genres, solitary men and a news cycle bursting with violence.
Gherman has made hundreds of paintings of weather-worn, hirsute captains, all superficially alike yet completely unique. The intensity of the captains’ gaze is heightened by the small scale of the works: a mere 52mm x 35mm. Closer inspection reveals these canvases to be Beehive matchboxes, adding combustibility and danger to the already-present power of the captains themselves.
In addition to the armada of matchbox captains, there’s a series of seven larger works (400mm x 400mm) and a triptych (400mm x 1200mm) which see the captains thrown together and unleashed in full back-street brawl. Here the captains, previously restrained in their I.D.-photo-size frame, appear to lose control of their repressed rage, attacking each other with bottles, ropes, clubs, chairs, axes and crowbars, as well as their fingers, feet and teeth.
A trio of oval works (250mm x 150mm) with three of our captains perished and washed upon the shore or rocks, showing them no match for nature’s force, or the force of other captains who may have thrown them at the mercy of the wind and waves.
The work will be on display for 1 week until Thursday 28 March.