Michael Hight
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 scuptural 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.
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 16th and 17th 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.
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Awarua/Haast River, 2024
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Clarence River/Waiautoa, 2024
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Kawarau River, 2024
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Kawatiri/Buller River, 2024
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Manuherikia River, 2024
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Māwheranui/Grey River, 2024
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Rakaia River, 2024
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Rangitata River, 2024
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Slope Hill Rd., 2024
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Taieri River, 2024
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Te Awa Whakatipu/Dart River, 2024
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Waikouaiti River, 2024
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Waimakariri River, 2024
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Wairau River, 2024
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Waitaki River, 2024
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Broken River, 2023
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Buller River, 2023
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Glenorchy, 2023
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Hakatere, 2023
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Potts River I, 2023
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Potts River II, 2023
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Road to Erewhon, 2023
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Ben McLeod Station, 2022
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Cooks Flat Road, Fox Glacier, 2022
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Mesopotamia, 2022
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Middle Rock, 2022
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Jerusalem: Hiruharama, 2020
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The Crooked Mile: Ohingaiti, 2020
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Kapuni Stream, 2016
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Lake Alice, 2016
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Ohakea The Decoy, 2016
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Pembroke Road, 2016
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Rakiura: Gog and Magog, 2016
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Siberia Station, 2016
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Headwaters
Michael Hight 27 Nov - 24 Dec 2024 Auckland CityThe fragmented relationships between landscapes, memories and human interventions have been long-standing subjects of exploration for artist Michael Hight. In this new body of work by the self-taught painter, Headwaters, the artist turns his attention to the rivers of the South Island. These rivers, as the exhibition title suggests, act as both literal and metaphorical sources—wellsprings of imagery for his hyperreal and symbolic paintings.Read more -
Michael Hight
22 Mar - 15 Apr 2023 Auckland CityFor this exhibition of new paintings, Michael Hight returns to well-known hyperreal landscapes, inspired by South Island imagery from Glenorchy to the Buller River.Read more -
Two Rivers
Michael Hight 28 Oct - 21 Nov 2020Michael Hight’s latest exhibition Two Rivers makes particular reference to the Whanganui and Rangitikei Rivers, sites of personal significance to the artist’s whakapapa and upbringing. The exhibition brings together two distinct compositional approaches, which share common meditations on the Anthropocene’s manipulation of the natural landscape.Read more -
The Hunterville Suite
Michael Hight 11 Jul - 4 Aug 2018Michael Hight returns to Gow Langsford Gallery with a solo exhibition of recent works returning to a series commonly referred to as ‘the black paintings’ - a crucial series of Hight’s oeuvre since 2008.Read more
The Hunterville Suite presents six paintings that recall historical notions of the theatre of memory and cabinets of curiosities. -
Michael Hight
5 - 29 Apr 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021]Michael Hight returns to Gow Langsford Gallery with a solo exhibition of paintings that revisit the subject for which he is most well-known: landscapes, both familiar and transcendental, that are populated with beehives.Read more -
Return to the Miniature Garden
Michael Hight 18 May - 11 Jun 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021]Michael Hight has shown with Gow Langsford Gallery since it opened in the late 1980s. Known widely for his realist landscape paintings, Return to the Miniature Garden follows Dreams of Children (2012) and Crossing The Line (2014) and is the third exhibition of newer ‘black paintings’ at Gow Langsford, which are gaining a momentum of their own.Read more
As in earlier series’ childhood memory informs this body of work and a key reference for this exhibition is the miniature garden that countless New Zealand children had to make in the 1960s. Baking trays, tins and saucers were appropriated to make small, idealised versions of reality. The miniature garden was an act of making but also an act of scavenging and making do. Hight began his exploration of his now chosen technique of ‘black painting’ in 2008, noting a significant shift from his earlier iconic beehive paintings. The black paintings can be viewed as theatrical tableaux that feature memorabilia, historical moments and specific landscapes. Objects range from the absurd model of a C20 dreadnought battle ship to automata (wind-up toys) with their inferred staccato movements to an outdated telephone exchange. This series includes numerous scales with homely links to colonial kitchens and baking, and undercurrent issues of justice and the weighing up of how things were done.
Place is equally diverse. Kapuni Stream, a painting that juxtaposes kitchen scales with two pa sites, is the location of one of the earliest conflicts between Maori and Pakeha. Rakiura - Gog and Magog represents Stewart Island’s two remote mountains that were named after Celtic giants. Settings resonate from the rugged landscape of a central North-Island sheep station to a more picturesque view of Mt Taranaki from Pembroke Road. All paintings have an autobiographical element — none more so than Pohokura, which features the Aunt Martha’s ballpoint paint tubes that had mesmerised a young boy in the 1960s. Anecdote and memory circulate above both land and object to the extent the paintings are also the works of a storyteller who keeps secrets as much as he reveals. Yet standing before a musical toy or a green ridged hill is to step into your own anecdote and buffeting memory.
For further information on Hight, the publication Michael Hight: Crossing The Line (2014) by Michael Hight and Gow Langsford Gallery is available to purchase. It provides an overview of his previous works, with essays by Gregory O’Brien and Dr. Paula Green and includes a conversation between John Gow and Michael Hight. -
Five Painters
Group Exhibition 12 - 23 Jan 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021]Five Painters is a cross selection of five contemporary New Zealand artists, each with a distinct approach to painting.Read more -
Crossing The Line
Michael Hight 25 Jun - 19 Jul 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021]The 2012 exhibition The Dreams of Children signalled a shift in Michael Hight’s painting practice. The black paintings had a dramatic and nocturnal quality which is extended in Crossing the Line as the new works continue Hight’s fascination with memory, archives, encyclopaedias and the surprising relations between things. Each work is like a theatrical tableau placed upon a shelf against a black backdrop for the viewer to behold. A handful of elements are juxtaposed to produce multiple effects—luminous paintwork, autobiographical threads, historical narratives, psychological judders, allegory, metaphor and so on. In contrast to Hight’s beehive paintings, these works feature landscape on a reduced scale. It is partitioned off and rattles against the things and people placed in the scene. At times, the paintings generate a sense of unease, the macabre, the unfamiliar, a visual puzzle. At other times, the effect is nostalgic, moving, deeply familiar.Read more -
Dreams Of Children
Michael Hight 8 Aug - 1 Sep 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021]Artist Micheal Hight is well-known for his on-going exploration of beehives and the sun-drenched New Zealand landscape. In contrast, his new series is largely autobiographical and is drawn from memories of growing up in Taranaki in the 60s and 70s. These paintings have a sense of the theatrical and with their dreamscape settings a nocturnal quality, which could be seen as an antithesis to Hight’s earlier beehive works. Both beautiful and curiously haunting, Hight has said of his new collection ‘I am interested in the way objects, places and events reassemble themselves through memory.’Read more
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Artists Collaborate with Top Musicians to Raise Money for the Salvation Army
April 10, 2019Seven of our artists, Reuben Paterson , Darryn George , Dick Frizzell , Michael Hight , Max Gimblett , John Walsh and Karl Maughan have...Read more -
Michael Hight at Britomart Project Space
August 6, 2016Three of Michael Hight's recent works are on display at the Britomart Project Space , located at 26-28 Customs Street East. These works are from...Read more
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Sydney Contemporary 2019 | Booth B02
12 - 15 Sep 2019For Sydney Contemporary 2019, Gow Langsford Gallery is showcasing a range of works from New Zealand and Australian artists and works from prominent British sculptor Tony Cragg. Find us at Booth B02 to view works by John Olsen, Dale Frank, Lisa Roet, Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters, Laurence Aberhart, Dick Frizzell, Michael Hight, Reuben Paterson, Hugo Koha Lindsay, Judy Millar and Max Gimblett.Read more -
Sydney Contemporary 2018 | Booth B02
13 - 16 Sep 2018Gow Langsford Gallery will be exhibiting a selection of works from New Zealand and international artists at this years Sydney Contemporary held at Carriageworks. Visit Booth B02 to see works by Tony Cragg, Paul Dibble, Leah Emery, Dale Frank, Rosalie Gascoigne, Andre Hemer, Michael Hight, Sara Hughes, Gregor Kregar, Colin McCahon, David McCracken, Toby Raine, Lisa Roet, Ugo Rondinone and Bernar Venet.Read more -
Sydney Contemporary 2015 | Booth B02
10 - 13 Sep 2015We are excited to be participating in Sydney Contemporary 2015. Visit us at Booth B2 and see new works by Judy Millar, Andre Hemer, James Cousins, Graham Fletcher, Dale Frank and Paul Dibble alongside works by Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters, Jono Rotman and Tony Cragg.Read more