Dick Frizzell

Dick Frizzell is one of Aotearoa’s most widely known and celebrated painters.  His work traverses genres with an assured confidence and skill. In this major new exhibition, Frizzell returns to the historically rich tradition of landscape painting, embedded, as ever, with his playful and idiosyncratic sensibilities. Frizzell’s landscapes bring into focus fragments of the New Zealand landscape that feel deeply familiar. They are down-to-earth, up-the-road, intentionally unspectacular scenes.  Poplar trees emerge from the end of a gravel path, a ladies toilet stands on a lean, a boarded-up fishing hut sits proudly in the sunshine, while a shadowed tree foregrounds a rolling mist – in Frizzell’s hands, the quotidian is front-and-centre spectacular. They come, moreover, from a place of optimism.  Frizzell comments: “My landscapes occupy a special place in my affections because they define, more than any other of my endeavours, the most solid manifestation of my philosophy. Both the subjects and their manner of representation are chosen to emphasise my eternally optimistic faith in the physical universe that I believe we are ultimately destined to define. I hope…through my piles of hills, stumps, trees and land…to literally convey ‘the gravity of the situation’.”