Ralph Hotere's Godwit/Kuaka at City Gallery Wellington

If you're a fan of Ralph Hotere's artwork and will be in Wellington between now and 23 November, I'd highly recommend that you visit City Gallery Wellington.  We're very excited about the City Gallery's exhibition of Godwit/Kuaka, a much-loved large-scale mural by Ralph Hotere.
 

Installation view, Ralph Hotere  Godwit/Kuaka 1977  enamel on board  Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of Auckland International Airport Ltd, 1997

This artwork, part of the Chartwell Collection, was last on display at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki as part of the exhibition Toi Aotearoa from 2011 to 2013.    

Ron Brownson, Senior Curator of New Zealand and Pacific Art, wrote about Godwit/Kuaka on this blog after Ralph Hotere passed away last year, and shared the essay that was published about the work in 2011.  

For more information about the Wellington exhibition, see City Gallery's website.

Artworks on loan, October 2013

Lending artworks to other institutions allows us to share our collections with more visitors, not just in Auckland, but also around New Zealand and across the world. As one of the registrars at Auckland Art Gallery, I look after our loans programme, and work with our technicians, conservators and curators to prepare and send our artworks out on loan. I thought I'd share with you some of the artworks from our collections that are currently on loan.

Dowse Art Museum, As Many Structures As I Can: works from the Chartwell Collection

Image credit: Bill Culbert Light Plain, 1997, lamp shades, light bulbs and fittings, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2000, C2000/1/7.1-14 

We’re all really excited about the exhibition at the Dowse opening on 12 October and running until 16 February 2014. It’s called As Many Structures As I Can: works from the Chartwell Collection and features some amazing works from the Chartwell Collection, including Bill Culbert’s major work Light Plain. If you’re going to be in (or near) Wellington between now and February, you should definitely make the trip to the Dowse to see this show! The public programmes look fantastic as well, and if you’re interested in seeing Simon Ingram create a painting or fancy a cuppa with Bill Culbert, check out the Dowse’s website for more details.

Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Hotere and Culbert

Image credit: Bill Culbert, Ralph Hotere, Post Black No.13, 1992, painted window frame, glass, and fluorescent tube, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 1992, C1994/1/368

Opening on 12 October at Dunedin Public Art Gallery is a major exhibition of collaborative works by Ralph Hotere and Bill Culbert. Three works from the Chartwell Collection are included in this exhibition:

Post Black, Window #5
Post Black, Window #10
Post Black No.13

See the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's website for details of this exhibition.

Adam Art Gallery, John Panting: Spatial Constructions

Image credit: John Panting Untitled III , 1972, 1973, steel, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 1976, 1976/51/1

We’ve lent a large sculpture by John Panting to the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington for a major exhibition of Panting’s work, John Panting: Spatial Constructions. The exhibition is curated by Sam Cornish, who is the author of a recent monograph on Panting’s work. For more details, check out the Adam Art Gallery's website.

Adam Art Gallery, State of the art: reproductive prints from the Renaissance to now

Image credit: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes Qué hai que hacer mas? (What more can be done?), c 1816, etching, lavis drypoint, burin and burnisher, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 1955, 1955/42/9

Also on display at the Adam shortly is an exhibition on the history of reproductive prints. On loan to the Adam for this exhibition is Qué hai que hacer mas?(What more can be done?), by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes.

Tauranga Arts Festival, Public, Private and Pop-Ups

Image credit: Seung Yul Oh The Ability to Blow Themselves Up 2005, single channel digital video, colour, sound, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2005, C2005/1/13

If you’re in Tauranga at the end of October, you might see some video works from the Chartwell collection on display at Sisters Boutique. Public, Private and Pop-Ups is an exhibition at various sites around the city, and features four video works:

Seung Yul Oh, The Ability to Blow Themselves Up
Daniel von Sturmer, Painted Video
Steve Carr, Tyson
Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, Neon.

Check out their website to find out more about this exhibition.

Te Papa, Nga Toi: Arts Te Papa

Image credit: Petrus van der Velden Three figures in a landscape, c 1874, charcoal, crayon and gouache, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of Morris and Ronald Yock, in memory of their father, 1964, 1964/22

A work on paper by Petrus van der Velden will be on display soon at Te Papa, as part of their Nga Toi: Arts Te Papa series of exhibitions. See information on current and future exhibitions on their website.

City Gallery Wellington, New Revised Edition

Image credit: Nick Austin Fallin', 2006, acrylic and string on board, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2006, C2006/1/14/1

New Revised Edition is an exhibition at City Gallery Wellington featuring paintings by four New Zealand artists. One of the works by Nick Austin on display is Fallin’ from the Chartwell collection. See their website for further details.

MTG Hawke’s Bay, Architecture of the Heart

Image credit: Robyn Kahukiwa Te Whenua, Te Whenua, Engari Kaore He Turangawaewae (Placenta, Land, but Nowhere to Stand), 1987, alkyd and oil on canvas, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 1988, 1988/32

Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery have recently re-opened after a major redevelopment and rebranding. Now known as MTG Hawke’s Bay, they have a number of great exhibitions in their fancy new space! If you visit Hawke’s Bay over the summer, you might see a few artworks from the Auckland Art Gallery collection on show in Architecture of the Heart, an exhibition dealing with themes of 'home'.

Robyn Kahukiwa, Te Whenua, Te Whenua, Engari Kaore He Turangawaewae (Placenta, Land, but Nowhere to Stand)
Derrick Cherrie, Retroflex
Neil Dawson, Interior IX

Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Oceania: Tapa – Kunst und Lebenswelten (Art and Social Landscapes)

Image credit: John Pule Polynesia migration Aotearoa ,1992, acrylic on unstretched canvas, and barkcloth, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased with funds from Reader's Digest New Zealand, 1992, 1992/21

Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, a museum of ethnography in Cologne, Germany, has also recently reopened after a major building development. One of their new special exhibitions is titled Oceania: Tapa – Kunst und Lebenswelten (Art and Social Landscapes). One of the works in the exhibition is Polynesia migration Aotearoa, by John Pule.

More about Auckland Art Gallery's loans programme

If you are interested in finding out more about loans at Auckland Art Gallery, check out the following for more information on borrowing works from the Auckland Art Gallery and Chartwell collections:

Auckland Art Gallery Collection and Policies
Chartwell Collection: how to borrow works

- Fiona Moorhead, Assistant Registrar

Artworks on loan, October 2012

At Auckland Art Gallery we have a very busy loans programme, with artworks constantly travelling to museums and art galleries throughout New Zealand and around the world.  Here's a rundown of some of the artworks from Auckland Art Gallery and Chartwell collections that are currently on show elsewhere.  

You can find out more about our collection and loans policies at:

Auckland Art Gallery collection - overview and policies

Chartwell Collection - How to borrow works

Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua

One of the current exhibitions at Pataka Art + Museum is Joe Sheehan: Other Stories, a major survey show featuring a range of sculptural work by Joe Sheehan.  This exhibition is open until 25 November 2012, and if you're in the Wellington region this would be a great opportunity to view Joe Sheehan's incredible sculptures made from pounamu, marble, granite and other types of stone.

Joe Sheehan, Slide Show Carousel 2, 2009, (detail), 80 jade and pounamu slides, slide projector, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2011

Two works from the Chartwell collection are included in this exhibition - Slide Show Carousel 2 and Words Fail.

Joe Sheehan, Words Fail, 2011, carrara marble, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2011

Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Dunedin Public Art Gallery is currently showing work by Alfred O'Keeffe (1858-1941), who was an artist and teacher based in Dunedin.  O’Keeffe studied at the Académie Julian in Paris during the 1890s, at the same time as the young Charles Goldie attended the school. Unlike Goldie, O’Keeffe developed an impressionist style.



Alfred O'Keeffe, Still Life: Roses and Arum Lilies, 1906, oil on cardboard, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 1957



City Gallery Wellington

On 19 October 2012, Ben Cauchi: The Sophist's Mirror opens at City Gallery Wellington.  Two works by Ben Cauchi from the Chartwell collection are included in the exhibition - The way of all things and Loose Canvas: 

Ben Cauchi, The way of all things, 2010, wet-collodion on acrylic, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2010

Ben Cauchi, Loose Canvas, 2007, tintype, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2009

The series of public programmes offered as part of this exhibition would offer some fascinating insights into Ben Cauchi's practice, and would certainly be interesting if you wanted to find out more about the techniques used to create these photographs.

Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany

Further afield, the exhibition Contact.  Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand has just opened at Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, Germany.  This exhibition is part of the New Zealand presence at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where New Zealand is the Guest of Honour for 2012.

Included in this exhibition is one of Francis Upritchard's 'heads', Untitled 1, on loan from the Chartwell Collection.

Francis Upritchard, Untitled 1 2002-2003, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2003

If you're interested in finding out more about this exhibition, check out the video below made by the team at NZ@Frankfurt. 

A visit to Documenta13

Our Assistant Registrar Fiona Moorhead has joined the ranks of Gallery bloggers to share some snapshots of her recent travels...

Documenta is a contemporary art event held in Kassel, Germany once every five years. During the 100 days of Documenta, the population of Kassel swells as hundreds of thousands of art fans make the pilgrimage to this small town in the middle of Germany.  You have to wonder how the town's citizens deal with this onslaught, and what they think of the strange and wonderful artworks left behind.  This year, for Documenta13, I made the journey, and here are a few thoughts and images I've taken away from this visit.

A notable feature of Documenta is the variety of venues: in addition to the main venues of traditional museum and gallery spaces, the event spreads across the city, invading city gardens, a planetarium, natural history museum, an abandoned hotel, shops, cinemas, the train station and a children's library, just to name a few.  Many artists present works that are incidental to the location in which they are presented, but some artists create works that respond to their environment. 

One artwork that had a strong connection to its location was Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's work 'Alter Bahnhof Video Walk' which was based in the Kassel Hauptbahnhof (main train station). 

Visitors were invited to borrow an iPod loaded with a video and sound piece, which instructed you to follow the video maker's movements through the station.  The narrator mused on the physical location (taking you to the platform where trains departed to concentration camps during World War II), as well as more internal wanderings, through ideas of memory, place and relationships to loved ones.  The result was an intriguing form of augmented reality, where the events taking place in the video seemed to segue into reality.  The 'guided tour' feeling of the work offered another perspective to our experience of Documenta, where, armed with maps, we navigated through Kassel, trying to find Documenta venues, and sometimes encountering unexpected things along the way. 

With hundreds of artists' projects, lectures, congresses, film screenings, performances and other events, no one can possibly see the full gamut that Documenta has to offer. Instead, we all see just a small slice, and like our experience being guided around the train station by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, we are at times engaged with the physical experiences, and other times wrapped up in our own imaginations.