Exhibitions
20 February – 16 May 2010
City Gallery Wellington's Festival Season
Principal Sponsor: ANZ
Janet Cardiff: Forty Part Motet
Forty-Part Motet (2001) by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff is an immersive sculpturally-conceived sound piece, in which forty separately-recorded voices are played back through forty speakers. This staggering immersive installation is a reworking of Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui (1573) by Thomas Tallis, one of England’s most influential Renaissance composers.
Enter the gallery space and you encounter a circle of speakers, each emitting the voice of an individual chorister so that each speaker becomes a mouth. Visitors are encouraged to walk through the space listening to different configurations of voice parts. The eleven minute work begins with the assembly of the singers as they prepare to deliver the piece, pleasantries are exchanged, throats are cleared prior to silence as the conductor corrals to choir into action. At once intimate and encompassing, tender and incredibly dramatic, this work must be heard and felt in person.
Janet Cardiff’s work combines sound, movement and environment; the viewer/listener often proactively moves through the space activating sounds and unfolding narratives. She often works in collaboration with Georges Bures Miller and their work Murder of Crows was a huge hit at the recent 2008 Biennale of Sydney. Cardiff and Bures Miller live and work between Berlin and Grinros, BC, Canada.
Séraphine Pick
Seraphine Pick is one of New Zealand’s most highly regarded painters: her distinctive and imaginative practice has become increasingly familiar to many New Zealand audiences since the early 1990s. Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu presents Seraphine Pick, a large scale survey exhibition featuring works made between 1994-2009.
This exhibition traces the artist’s ongoing explorations into the imaginative realm, identity, memory, sexuality, and will unveil several new works. Seraphine Pick is both a long-overdue survey of a formidable New Zealand artist, and a chance to consider the development of her unique symbolism in the light of recent work. Curator Felicity Milburn has developed an exhibition that highlights recurrent threads in Pick’s practice, anchored by three themes: memory, identity and fantasy. The exhibition will be structured around these themes, between which there are many overlaps and points of connection.
Seraphine Pick will comprise 80-100 paintings, and a small selection of works on paper from throughout the artist’s career. It will be accompanied by a large, richly illustrated publication produced by Christchurch Art Gallery, featuring essays by the curator and Lara Strongman alongside shorter texts on individual works. This exhibition will come to City Gallery Wellington direct from Christchurch Art Galley, where its opening season runs from 24 July – 22 November 2009.
A Christchurch Art Gallery touring exhibition. Touring sponsor Ernst & Young.
Trans-Form: The Abstract Art of Milan Mrkusich
Now in his early eighties, Milan Mrkusich is one of New Zealand’s leading artists investigating languages of abstraction. With the exception of the 1996 Auckland Art Gallery show of the Six Journey, Mrkusich’s work has not been the sole subject of a show in a public gallery since the retrospective of 51 works at the ACAG in 1985.
Eschewing the format of a retrospective, the exhibition shows Mrkusich’s different responses to the problem of abstraction as it has appeared throughout his career. Perhaps foremost among these are his successful attempts to resolve the perennial dichotomy of form and content, which is a problem that has plagued a number of critics, historians and artists throughout the twentieth century. The show will examine a selection of works from the early 1960s through to his more recent work, using examples drawn from each of his major series of paintings. Works chosen will in the main be drawn from private collections and will not have been seen publicly before.
Born in Dargaville, New Zealand in 1925, during the 1950s Milan Mrkusich was a partner in the Auckland architectural and design firm Brenner Associates, working on a number of architectural commissions. In 1946, he painted the first abstract painting in New Zealand, and his paintings have remained consistently abstract ever since. Major surveys of his work include a retrospective exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery in 1972, followed by Milan Mrkusich: A Decade Further On (1985). In 1982 he was included in the 48th Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh. He was the major figure of the Auckland Art Gallery's The 1950s Show (1992) where he was awarded a section of his own, as well as appearing in the design, architecture and painting sections. Milan Mrkusich: Six Journeys was shown at Auckland Art Gallery in 1996. Mrkusich was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand in 1997 for his services to painting and awarded the status of Icon Artist by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand in 2003. He lives and works in Auckland.
A partnership with the Gus Fisher Gallery, National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, The University of Auckland, curated by Allan Wright and Ed Hanfling. A monograph on Milan Mrkusich will be published by AUP to accompany the exhibition.