Notations: Hugo Koha Lindsay

Primarily an abstract painter, Hugo Koha Lindsay's (Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Maru) practice explores concepts of mapping within a cognitive and spatial framework.  Lindsay is interested in the shifting ambience of the city, with traces of the urban environment or allusions to its planning, construction, and our interactions with it often apparent in his choice of materials.  How the intermingling dynamics of public and private space-macro and micro-are experienced, digested and take on new forms in cognitive space are of importance to Lindsay, who looks to painting as a way of translating these experiences.

Within this conceptual framework, Lindsay's work is highly process driven. Across large scale canvases we can see the artist exploring what it is to press, to score, to tear, to conceal, to reveal, to mask, to stain, to spread, or to transmit.  Lindsay's use of these verbs, and the wider structural component of language, is a method the artist employs to create structural parity through the language of painting.  Techniques are layered in a system of accrual, which develop points of tension or exchange between what can often be contradictory ideas or visuals.  Lindsay embraces these moments of collision. Flat planes intersect with drawn or painterly surfaces, with stark shifts in tone.  Shades of white are apparent across many of the works, often in acts of erasure, as a subtle yet deliberate reference to colonization or gentrification.  It is, moreover, a technique the artist employs to suggest re-writing, rendering contents opaque and offering a new point of departure.

In many of the works, a dialogue is evident between the limits of the body and the surface of a painting as a receptor.  Lines created by an outstretched arm draw faint venn diagrams or arcs around the body's position.  In other areas, the pressure of a knee or the faint trace of fingers and elbows are evident from the making of the work on a flat surface. They are at once a map of the activity of the body, cognition, macro and micro framed within the activity of painting.
Lindsay holds a Master of Fine Arts with first class honours from the University of Auckland. He has acquired numerous awards and notable recognition including the Kaipara Wallace Arts Trust Award (2015), the Parkin Drawing Prize (2015, 2017), and the Molly Morpeth Canaday Painting and Drawing Award (2016).  His works are held in public and private collections throughout Australasia and Europe.

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Hugo Koha Lindsay since 2017.