Day Paintings

André Hemer 28 Nov - 22 Dec 2018 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In Day Paintings, André Hemer explores the relationship between digital media and painting, between materiality and form. In dusky tones and silky hues of peach, Hemer builds layered surfaces combining scanning techniques with printed and painted gestures. In this series, painted objects were scanned outdoors, picking up a sense of the atmospheric conditions in which they were captured. Read more

Master of Line

Henri Matisse 31 Oct - 24 Nov 2018 Henri Matisse (France, 1869 – 1954) was a pioneering figure in Modern art, and is recognised as one of the most influential artists of the era. Renowned worldwide for his extraordinary ability to capture the essence of his subject in just a few powerful lines, Matisse was an accomplished draughtsman, sculptor, and printmaker, moving between various media and techniques with ease. This exclusive exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery presents a curated selection of etchings, lithographs, aquatints, and linocuts spanning a period from as early as 1906 until shortly before his death in 1954. Master of Line marks the first time Matisse’s works will be exhibited in a private gallery in New Zealand. Read more

Hikoi

Darryn George 31 Oct - 24 Nov 2018 Christchurch based artist Darryn George’s new exhibition Hikoi approaches history painting from a contemporary, New Zealand perspective.

The namesake of the exhibition and the main focus is the seven-paneled work Hikoi (2018). At over seven meters in length, this work is an abstract representation of an aerial view over the Red Sea as the waters are being blown back. Combining gestural abstraction with the intricate patterning of kōwhaiwhai, George overlays Māori text onto plumes of painted canvas to depict the journey of Israel from slavery through the Red Sea to the Promised Land; a journey from darkness to light. Read more

The Poignancy of Absence

Paul Dibble 3 - 27 Oct 2018 Birds have long been associated by humans with the ethereal. Appearing globally in lore as omens and symbols, they act as airborne messengers traversing the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. Flowers too have historically been ascribed a symbolic meaning, regularly employed in art and literature to express a hidden narrative, or gifted as traditional expressions of love and loss. The metaphorical significance of the two might seem tethered to the past – yet our contemporary world abounds with birds and flowers used as emblems for cultures, countries, and companies. But what happens when we lose the icon itself? The Poignancy of Absence, Paul Dibble’s exhibition of new sculptures, considers the impact of extinction on our cultural ecosystem, and presents a eulogy to New Zealand’s own lost fauna. Read more

Landscapes

Dick Frizzell and Karl Maughan 3 - 27 Oct 2018 Considered two of New Zealand’s most prominent living artists, close friends Karl Maughan and Dick Frizzell have joined forces once again. Their sold out 1998 joint exhibition aptly titled Landscapes will be revisited 20 years later as both artists draw on the New Zealand landscape as a mutual point of inspiration. It is what Frizzell calls “The reunion tour …getting the band back together”. Read more

Monadic Device at Sydney Contemporary 2018

Simon Ingram 13 - 16 Sep 2018 Simon Ingram in collaboration with John-Paul Pochin will present an endurance-based artwork of sorts, Monadic Device, a five-day painting event in which Ingram’s mental activity is recorded as a response to his own drawing and to the environment of Sydney Contemporary. Picked up by an EEG headset and interpreted by custom software, this data is then materialised as a series of paintings by a machine developed by the artist. In undertaking this project the artist brings together elements of his recent work at Germany’s ZKM Centre for Art and Media where invisible cosmic energy was made visible as painting with a new, rekindled interest in subjectivity, people, and politics. Read more

The Golden Haze

Graham Fletcher 5 - 29 Sep 2018 Graham Fletcher’s Samoan and European genealogy provides a constant interplay of disparities in his overall artistic practice. In this new body of work, Fletcher uses a selection of ethnographic objects collected throughout many of Captain James Cook’s voyages and reimagines these objects within ‘tasteful’ modern interiors in his continuing examination of the complex and dynamic relationship between the civilised and ‘primitive’, colonial and colonised, and the observers and the observed. This exhibition, entitled The Golden Haze, marks the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first landmark expedition to the Pacific. The inspiration for the title came after reading Roderick Cameron’s The Golden Haze: With Captain Cook in the South Pacific (1964) in which the author, between 1959 and 1961, retraced Cook’s voyages in the Pacific journaling his own personal experiences in contrast with those of Cook's. Read more

Step Size Zero

James Cousins 5 - 29 Sep 2018 The title for James Cousins' new exhibition refers to the Graphtec cutters setting, step size 0, the optimum level of precision available, which regulates levels of accuracy during the cutting of the long arcs and curves that make the vinyl stencils employed in the making of Cousins’ works. The demands of these large new works pressurise this precision to a point where unregulated incidentals, slips, rumbles, blips and bleeds seep into the complexly patterned orthodoxy of the cut stencils. This ethos of suggestion and retraction is also echoed through the orchestrated patterns of wide bands, derived from a dual tracking of movement of an airbrush across and around the supporting canvas, evident in the underpainting that layer the canvasses. Read more

Studies in Place

Judy Millar 8 Aug - 1 Sep 2018 Often working on a large scale, Judy Millar’s latest exhibition Studies in Place provides an intimate viewing of works that are typically unseen outside of her studio; her smaller works on paper. Referenced as ‘studies’, these works showcase Millar’s painterly thought process as she begins to flesh out ideas that may later be conceived on canvas. Unintentionally, these studies become complete works in themselves and have been critical to her practice since 1987, when Millar first moved to the extreme environment that is Auckland’s West Coast. Read more

Dale Frank

8 Aug - 1 Sep 2018 Australian artist Dale Frank is known for his evocative abstract works challenging the concept of painting. Widely recognized as one of Australia’s most successful artists, his works are aligned with some of the most exciting and innovative contemporary painters of today. This solo exhibition of new works at our Lorne St Gallery sees materials such as varnish and aluminium collide in lively surfaces both fluid and deeply textural. Read more

The Hunterville Suite

Michael Hight 11 Jul - 4 Aug 2018 Michael 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.

The Hunterville Suite presents six paintings that recall historical notions of the theatre of memory and cabinets of curiosities. Read more

Who Told You You Were Naked

Leah Emery 11 Jul - 4 Aug 2018 Gow Langsford Gallery is proud to present Australian artist Leah Emery’s first solo exhibition in New Zealand. This exhibition features two bodies of works; It’s Going Swimmingly (2015) and Who Told You You Were Naked (2016-current), both using cross-stitch embroidery to portray the explicit pornographic subject matter. Read more

Tony Cragg

9 May - 4 Jul 2018 Tony Cragg is widely recognized as one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation. Having maintained a consistently high international profile since the 1980s his work has contributed significantly to the global discourse around contemporary sculpture. At the center of his practice is an interest in the relationship between materials, science and the body.

This phenomenal new exhibition at our Lorne Street Gallery showcases works from a variety of mediums, including wood, marble, steel and bronze. Each is multi-faceted, exploring possibilities for stimulating multiple perceptions within a single work. Read more

Colin McCahon

7 May - 7 Jul 2018 Following the success of our recent presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong, this exhibition brings together paintings from several of Colin McCahon’s most formative stages and will reflect the significance of a home-grown artist, whose stature in Australasia can only be compared to the influence that artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko had on American art. Spanning two decades of his career - from 1958 to 1977 - the show documents the scope of the artist’s evolving concerns: the relationship between Maori and the New Zealand landscape, as well as the influence of early settlers and their beliefs on this revered land. Read more

A Place to Stand

Group Exhibition 18 Apr - 4 May 2018 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] A Place to Stand is a curated exhibition that considers the complexities of humans’ relationship to the landscape. While not a landscape exhibition in the traditional sense these works are linked by the impact ‘place’ has had on each artist. Read more

Serial Works: Masonic Lodges. Taranaki

Laurence Aberhart 21 Mar - 14 Apr 2018 An Aberhart photograph is one which is instantly recognisable. Laurence Aberhart captures the everyday, our past and our present all through atmospheric black and white photography. Despite the perceived quietness of his imagery, his ability to capture immense depth and detail is all down to the analogue process he employs along with a complex understanding on the effect of light, and an inherent ability to frame an image perfectly. This new exhibition features a selection of photographs with Masonic lodges as the protagonist taken from as far North as Kaitaia, down to Balclutha in Otago alongside photographs of Taranaki taken between 1986 to 2010. Read more

But will it float

Hugo Koha Lindsay 21 Mar - 14 Apr 2018 Primarily an abstract painter, Hugo Koha Lindsay adopts marks from both the personal surroundings of his home and studio and from the wider urban environment. Rubbings from the studio floor combine with swift gestures resembling surveyor markings - a type of code applied to pavements to signify future construction. Canvases are un-stretched, cut, sewn and re-stretched, organizing pictorial space through the work’s construction. Sections of Lindsay’s paintings are often left raw, invoking a transitional state. Lindsay states, “The sewn paintings act as topographies -an informational surface of which territories are divided by physical boundaries for the activity of painting to occur.” Read more