John Pule: A Survey 1990 - 2011

14 Dec 2011 - 21 Jan 2012 Auckland City When John Pule first arrived in inner city Auckland as a young adult in 1980, the formal tenets of poetry and painting were largely unknown to him. Over the next 30 years Pule would explore new directions as both writer and painter, and has since emerged as one of this... Read more

Tony Cragg

16 Nov 2011 - 21 Jan 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] British sculptor Tony Cragg is one of the most highly acclaimed and influential sculptors of his generation. Having maintained a consistently high international profile since the 1980s his work has contributed significantly to the discourse around contemporary sculpture. At the centre of his sculptural practice is an interest in the... Read more

Post Pop

Group Exhibition 16 Nov 2011 - 21 Jan 2012 Auckland City Pop Art revolutionized contemporary thinking towards art in the 1950s as aspects of mass culture were elevated to an art world more traditionally occupied by high art subjects and trends. Advertising, comics and mundane subjects of mass culture became the hot topics for artists Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Roy Litchenstein... Read more

Allen Maddox

21 Oct - 12 Nov 2011 Auckland City Allen Maddox's work stands out from that of his peers. Although only in his early fifties at the time of his death in 2000, Maddox remains an important and powerful figure within the history of New Zealand painting. His ardent and impassioned paintings established him as one for the most noted Abstract Expressionists this country has produced.

In his lifetime Maddox produced a comprehensive body of work that is broadly characterised by an uncompromisingly bold and expressive style, and a seemingly obsessive use of the cross and grid motifs. His persistent combination of a formal structural element - the cross and or grid - with free gesture has numerous interpretations, but it is the paradox buried in the relationship between order and expressionism that lends Maddoxs works their seemingly boundless dynamism. Also paramount to Maddox's legacy is the romantic notion of the struggling artist who above everything was dedicated to his artistic practice.

This exhibition brings together a collection of paintings and works on paper that span several decades and different series within his career, some of which will be exhibited for the first time. Read more

Driven to Abstraction

Group Exhibition 21 Oct - 12 Nov 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Driven to Abstraction is a group show of contemporary artists who together represent a diverse range of entry points into abstraction.

Judy Millar’s paintings, based on gesture, lend themselves to elements of both Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction. Millar plays on the notion of gesture in abstraction but adds an ironic twist to the discussion by using screen-printing techniques to generate the final image. Like Millar, Simon Ingram’s non-objective canvases signal more contemporary approaches in his innovative use of modern technologies combined with the hand drawn, in his painting practice. The slug-like painted forms in the two Untitled works appear to devour the formal geometric elements of the painting and one senses that with the passing of time these works will return to the pristine plain white surfaces that existed prior to Ingram making his marks.

Max Gimblett’s large diptych Either/Or from 1983 appears at first glance to be a classic piece of American minimalist painting. However the surface of the work is activated by Gimblett’s masterful use of heavy brushwork to create texture. In the centre of each square a rectangle painted in the same colour and manner as the rest of the painting subtly reveals itself to the viewer. Allen Maddox’s ardent and impassioned paintings established him as one for the most noted Abstract Expressionists New Zealand has produced. Colin McCahon’s Jump painting is indicative of the abstracted landscapes for which is well known.

Although not strictly abstract American Isaac Layman’s photographs offer an alternative perspective on everyday subjects, as the context of his subjects is shifted. By shifting scale and limiting colour creates formal abstract compositions. In Blackout Laymen photographs a blind in a window to produce a work that references the American painter Agnes Martin.

Through myriad approaches, media and materials Driven to Abstraction considers the visual language of abstraction. Read more

Rugby, Rhyming and Here

Dick Frizzell 21 Sep - 15 Oct 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] New work by Dick Frizzell spans both gallery spaces in Rugby, Rhyming and Here. Covering three themes Frizzell's new works are inspired by New Zealand's devotion to Rugby, the poetry of Sam Hunt and our rugged, unique landscape.

Infamous for his eclectic styles, Frizzell has emerged as an icon of New Zealand Visual Culture and his Four Square Man has become a distinct image of Kiwiana itself. Fittingly, Frizzell was selected as the official artist for RWC 2011 and created a series of images that encapsulate our culture and Rugby’s place within it. Along with his limited edition boxed sets and imagery used on official tournament apparel Frizzell has created a suite of paintings around the Rugby idea. Ranging from his infamous 'Tiki' (which courted such controversy when unveiled in the 1990s in the midst of a national debate about biculturalism) to a nostalgic image of half-time oranges for sustenance, bootlaces in the shape of New Zealand and an animated strip of the haka, these works are quintessentially Kiwi and typically Frizzellean.

A second grouping of paintings in Rugby, Rhyming and Here can loosely be called text based works as they take their basis in words by legendary poem Sam Hunt. While some fall within the category of Frizzell’s ‘sign works’ others seem to recall Colin McCahon’s written paintings and drawings of the late 1960s.

The ‘sign’ based works are particularly interesting in relation to the series of more traditional landscapes which make up the third grouping included in Rugby, Rhyming and Here, as the sign works can be understood as an extension of landscape painting. The ‘sign’ series began in the early 2000s as Frizzell, having recently moved from Auckland to the Hawkes Bay, began to treat the signage of his new environment in the same way he would any other object in the landscape. What resulted were groupings of seemingly unrelated slogans and icons together within a single composition, all the yellow signs or all the fruit signs for example, giving the effect of being a single placard. Frizzell affectionately referred to these early sign works as "close up" landscapes so close that "all you can see is the sign on the gate" (Dick Frizzell: The Painter (2009), pg. 243).
The exhibition brings together three distinct elements of New Zealand culture and can be understood as a celebration of all three. Rugby, Rhyming and Here runs across two gallery spaces - at our Lorne St Gallery and our gallery on the corner of Kitchener and Wellesley Sts. Read more

Spring Catalogue 2011

Group Exhibition 31 Aug - 17 Sep 2011 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Spring Catalogue has become an annual tradition at Gow Langsford Gallery. This year the catalogue exhibition boasts a stellar line up of works. Spring Catalogue 2011 brings together significant works from the local secondary market including paintings by Colin McCahon, Don Binney and Ralph Hotere, works by prominent contemporary international artists including Ai Wei Wei, Damien Hirst; shown alongside works from artists in the gallery stable, including Tony Cragg, Bernar Venet, John Pule, Max Gimblett and Judy Millar. Read more

The Dead and the Souls

Damien Hirst 20 Jul - 17 Aug 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Infamous for his wealth, celebrity and his record-breaking, bank-breaking auction prices, Damien Hirst has become somewhat the poster boy for British Art of his era. Rarely shown in this country, Auckland audiences will be treated to an exhibition of his work at Gow Langsford Gallery this winter. Although it may be difficult not to mention money when talking about Hirst, the exhibition The Dead and The Souls brings together a selection of editioned works, as well as some impressive originals, which will appeal to those with pockets shallower than Charles Saatchi's.

The two bodies of editioned work on show, The Dead (2009) and The Souls (2010) envelop several of Hirst's well known concerns; death and life, beauty and desire with a dynamism typical of Hirst's work. The consecutive series are each made up of a few compositions in various colour-ways and each print is in an edition of only fifteen. In The Souls butterflies, as symbols for both the beauty of life and its impermanence, become metaphors for faith and death, while the skull imagery in The Dead make overt reference to mortality. Laid out like museum specimens and more or less anatomically correct Hirst has beautified his subjects through the use of block foil printing. "Of The Souls Hirst has said: I love butterflies because when they are dead they look alive. The foil block makes the butterflies have a feel similar to the actual butterflies in the way that they reflect the light. After The Dead I had to do the butterflies because you can't have one without the other". [Bracewell, M. (2010)]

The mass of imagery and scintillating colour creates spectacle, perhaps inevitable for Hirst, while collectively these works remind us of his power as an image maker and his enduring ability to captivate his audience.

As well as the two collections above we will be showcasing several of Hirst's sculptural Spin Skull works, three butterfly paintings and the impressive original, Beautiful Apollo Idealisation Painting. Read more

Accent

James Cousins 29 Jun - 16 Jul 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] James Cousins is known for his complex paintings which are formed from combined stencils, found imagery and processes extending from a paint, canvas, materiality nexus. Accent presents the second instalment of two shows - the first exhibition was held in Brisbane earlier this year - and further extends upon ideas... Read more

WORD

Group Exhibition 8 - 25 Jun 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] While image-based art is largely interpreted with some ambiguity, text-based works are often understood as direct and clear representations, even explanations of ideas. WORD, an exhibition of text-based works, seeks to illuminate how text can operate as part of a visual language. Although their approaches are multifarious, text is an... Read more

Idlewild

Karl Maughan 18 May - 4 Jun 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Ever faithful to his garden subject Karl Maughan is one of New Zealand’s most recognisable artists. With a career now spanning more than three decades, Maughan’s practice continues to gain momentum and captivate his audiences with his contemporary interpretations of an age-old subject. Despite a dedication to his to subject,... Read more

Radio Painting

Simon Ingram 27 Apr - 14 May 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery presents Radio Painting an exhibition of new paintings by Simon Ingram. As an artist Simon Ingram is known for his collaborations with machines. Unlike most painters, Ingram takes up a position distanced from the direct act of painting and is interested in ideas of self-making painting. Through... Read more

Lucifer: Bring The Light!

Judy Millar 30 Mar - 29 Apr 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In a group of works that include directly painted canvasses, combined paintings and digital prints and oversized silk-screened images, Judy Millar’s exhibition Lucifer: Bring the Light! extends central aspects of her painting practice.

In recent years Millar has used mechanically-generated enlargements of handmade gestures and challenged our expectations of expressive gesture and of the efficacy of painting as a means of communication. In these works Millar both distilled and amplified the act of painting. The works distil the essence of the painterly gesture, exaggerating the dramatic intention and collapsing the activity into a singular moment. The initial act of immediacy of the artist in the studio is simultaneously diluted by its translation into digital image, and exaggerated as gestural marks become oversized and threaten engulf the viewer. They present us with a compression of action that packs the same punch and urgency that we find in the advertisements that surround us. There is a clear desire to grant art the same power as all the other images that press upon us daily.

In Lucifer: Bring the Light! this relationship is compounded further as the highly sophisticated printing technologies works have been replaced by low-fi screen-printing methods. If the origins of some of her gestures was perhaps unclear in earlier works in these works their printed nature is overstated. Millar’s shift from digital to manual printing processes have resulted in cruder printed surfaces which reiterate the translation of the artist’s gestural intervention to a printed, more static image. The outcome leaves the viewer confronted by the question of the authenticity of the final result.
Millar takes up violence as a way to compress time and develop a complex pictoriality. She uses it as an energy source rather than it having any moral implications. Like a fight scene in a comic, pictorial complexity is developed then flattened, presenting all the action on one level in a split second. As Robert Leonhard wrote in 2003, “Millar explores a gamut of possibilities: speed, rhythm and incident; compression and expansion; muscularity and dazzle; not to mention representational associations.” These comments apply more than ever to Millar’s latest body of work.

Judy Millar is one of New Zealand’s most highly regarded and internationally recognised artists. Millar, along with Francis Upritchard represented New Zealand at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and following the success of her exhibition Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, has been invited to exhibit again at the upcoming Venice Biennale. Millar, approached by Dutch curators Karlyn De Jongh & Sarah Gold will create a new work for the exhibition Personal Structures: Time, Space, Existence, a collateral event of the Biennale. The line up of artists is extraordinary and includes revered American minimalist Carl Andre and 'the mother of performance art' Marina Abramovic.

Personal Structures: Time, Space, Existence will be on show at prestigious Venetian place Palazzo Bembo, located on the Grand Canal by the Rialto Bridge. Each artist has been nominated a room within the palace and will be creating new works for the show. Millar's work will integrate with the architectural elements of the space and her 3m meter tall canvas will literally fold out the palace window where it will be seen from the Grand Canal.

This is the first time a New Zealander has been invited to exhibit in this context and affirms Millar's international reputation which continues to gain momentum. In the lead up to this exhibition Millar will also be exhibiting new work in The Ring at Rohkunstbau, Berlin. The Ring is based on Wagner's The Ring of Nibelung and is particularly interesting for Millar, as a New Zealand artist because of its shared relationship to The Lord of the Rings. Read more

Lisa Roet

2 - 26 Mar 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The work of Australian artist Lisa Roet focuses on her interest in the relationship between humans and primates. Although based in Melbourne Roet has spent considerable time observing primate behaviours both in their natural environments and in captivity. Her field observations form the basis of her drawings, bronze sculptures, film and photography and the exhibition Lisa Roet at Gow Langsford Gallery, brings together a collection of bronze works and charcoal drawings.

Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1967, Lisa Roet graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1987. Roet currently lives and works in Melbourne. Over the past ten years, she has also supplemented her studies with residencies at ape research centres and major international zoos in Berlin and Atlanta, as well as field observation of apes in the forests of Borneo, Malaysia.

Since her first show at Querhause Gallery, Berlin in 1992, Roet has held more than twenty-five solo exhibitions around the world. Particularly acclaimed are Aping, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne and The Depot Gallery, Sydney (2008); Simian Line, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne (2006); Lisa Roet: Finger of Suspicion, McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, Melbourne (2004); Pri-Mates, Lawrence Wilson Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth (2004); Pri-Mates Drawing, Melbourne Museum, Melbourne (2003); The Shadow, National Gallery of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2001); Pri-Mates: Hands, LiebmanMagnan Gallery, New York (2000-2001); and Sebrechts-Park, Brugge Kunst Halle, Brussels.

She has also participated in more than fifty group exhibitions including Den Hagg Sculptuur 2007/The Hague Sculpture 2007, The Hague, the Netherlands (2007); Satellite Project (12 Australian Artists), Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China (2006); McClelland Sculpture Survey & Award, McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park (2005 and 2003); Kiss of the Beast, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2005); Instinct, Monash University Museum of Art, Monash University, Melbourne (2004); Nature Machine Exhibition, Queensland Gallery of Art, Brisbane (2004);Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, Werribee Park, Victoria (2003); National Works on Paper Award, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria (2003); National Sculpture Prize, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2003); and Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2001).

Her various awards and achievements include the prestigious McClelland Sculpture Survey & Award (2005); The Kedumba Drawing Award (2005); the National Works on Paper Award (2003); and the National Sculpture Prize (2003). She has also been the recipient of several important grants, including an Asia Link Residency at the National Gallery of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2000).

Roet has featured in the Australian Art Collector's "Most Collectible Artists" (2001& 2007) and is the subject of an impressive monograph by Alexie Glass, Lisa Roet: Uncommon Observations, Thames & Hudson, Sydney, 2005.

Further reading on Lisa Roet's work:
A Clown and His Chimp by Ashley Crawford in Australian Art Collector (Issue 44, 2008).

Reviews
Listen to Kim Hill and Mary Kissler talk about Lisa Roet's exhibition during White Night. Radio NZ 26.03.2011 Read more