Art New Zealand Autumn 2024

My friend Paul Dibble. I first met him in Albert Park in 1962. A bunch of us had finished enrolling for Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University and were loafing on a grassed slope. As we sat indulging in small talk whilst sizing up our companions to be, a giant fellow walked down towards us and in a loud voice laughingly declared to half of Auckland, ‘You buggers look scruffy enough to be the new art students.’ We were mightily impressed, firstly by the casual audacity of his self-introduction, and shortly thereafter by the quality of his swearing. Whilst I thought it something I was good at, Paul Dibble was much better. What you saw with Paul was what you got, and what you got was a constant.…

With the passing of Bill Milbank the many artists who interacted with him over the 27 years of his tenure as director of the Sarjeant Gallery have lost a loyal and inspiring colleague, and friend. Curatorially speaking, Bill came from the wrong side of the tracks; he was not from an intellectual background of art history and aesthetics, and he held no degree in the higher theories of art production, but he did possess a great sensitivity to the aspirations of the artists that he met. A sensitivity that I was privileged to benefit from on several occasions, so this is really not an obituary, but a celebration of my and many other artists’ involvement with Bill. I will leave it to others to list in detail all Bill’s many…

Auckland Robbie Fraser Focus Fever Two Rooms, 6 October-4 November MICHAEL DUNN Geometric abstraction is a style of painting that has a relatively small but distinguished place in New Zealand contemporary practice. Its best-known local exponent is arguably the late Gordon Walters (1919-1995). Originating in Europe, its lineage has been traced back to Mondrian and his followers in the early twentieth century. Robbie Fraser’s show Focus Fever can be seen as a contemporary take on geometric abstraction by an artist who knows its history and is aware that its heyday was back in the 1960s and 1970s, most famously when op art became fashionable. His term Masculine Steampunk in one of his titles for the paintings in the show can be read as a witty allusion to the anachronistic feel…

The late Moana Jackson often described whakapapa as a ‘series of never-ending beginnings’, referring to the spiralling entanglement of past, present and future that whakapapa performs. Whakapapa is usually translated into English as ‘genealogy’, but it is its function as a verb—the act of placing in layers—that best describes the active practice of establishing and acknowledging connection that the concept involves. Te Hau Whakatonu: A Series of Never-Ending Beginnings, curated by Taarati Taiaroa at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, is aptly conceived of as one in a series of layers in a history of Māori art—a history which, in this telling, is insistent on its commitment to the local context of Taranaki, while also acknowledging the wider communities, narratives and associations to which the artworks refer. Te Hau Whakatonu brings together…

What can be learnt from water? Cyclone Gabrielle brought its power to bear last year, inscribing the phrase ‘atmospheric rivers’ in our memories. Sea levels are rising, and as part of the Pacific Ocean, with one of the longest coastlines in the world, we need to act. Artist Cathy Carter has been researching and working with water for over a decade. Her work is an exploration of how an engagement with this liquid medium might inform our political decisions and how we think about ourselves as humans on the planet. Carter is also a cold-water swimmer. Her own embodied engagement with the sea, often the Waitematā Harbour, is a powerful methodology for her art-making. It inspired her research for her Masters of Visual Arts presentation Immersion and Emergence at AUT…

Auckland-based Toby Raine is a striking artist. Literally. He uses his paints to search for his subject, layers up the colours and then slaps them back as if it is some BDSM game of peek-a-boo. He says he works his pieces until they surprise him, and once, that surprise was mine because it was my face up there on the gallery wall, larger than life in thick gestural strokes. Fast and expressive. Flesh from the waist up. The body aimed away but for the tilt of a shoulder. She, that other me, glanced back—as if to weigh my worth. She consisted of valleys and peaks with those typical thick layers, her face swiped away with one daring, bold, but graceful gesture. There was shape without high definition except where it…