Michael Hight

b. 1961, New Zealand
Lives in Auckland

Michael Hight is a self-taught painter who has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1980s. He is best known for his hyper-real paintings of beehives in the New Zealand landscape, which frequently depict locations in Central Otago and Canterbury. Hight’s more recent works include dark, surreal dreamscapes that weave in imagery of objects that have a personal significance to the artist. Toys, musical instruments, books, rusted corrugated iron and other such items are set in striking juxtaposition to rustic landscapes, often with dark skies above.

Hight has stated, “The beehive paintings involve extensive travel throughout New Zealand and an element of chance. Several key ideas are at work—the idea that the paintings are a literal recovery of found sculptural installations on the landscape, notions of transformation and the electric connections between light and dark, stillness and movement, order, and chaos. My later dark paintings delve into personal history, national history, along with the abstract. These paintings may be viewed as tableaux of memory, as a conveyor belt of memory that promotes mysterious and, at times surprising, links between various objects and landscapes.”

Hight’s engagement with the New Zealand landscape forms a commentary on human interaction with the geological environment. The ubiquitous beehive serves as a touchstone and a recurring motif, often suggesting an unseen human presence. In many of his works, the slow creep of natural decay alludes to an incremental but inevitable return to nature. This is subtly evident in the weathering of timber on beehives, in the rusting shells of scrapped cars, in collapsing walls of abandoned buildings. Hight’s paintings carry a sense of the uncanny, and a reminder of the vast discrepancies between human and geological time scales. Similar motifs run through his night paintings, which feature surreal dreamscapes. The content and aesthetic of these works is reminiscent of European vanitas paintings of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, which reflected on mortality and the temporal nature of matter. Unifying themes in these two bodies of work are geographical specificity and reflections on the complex relationship between humans and the natural environment. 

Hight has an exhibition history of more than 25 years. He continues to exhibit regularly in New Zealand and Australia. Highlights include inclusion in exhibitions at City Gallery, Wellington (2001 and 2007)—and his work is held in numerous public and private collections in New Zealand, and private collections in the UK, Germany, Italy, USA, Hong Kong and Australia. In 2014 Gow Langsford Gallery published his first monograph Michael Hight: Crossing the Line.

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Michael Hight since 1987.