Publications

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The Nita Gini Collection: Lauren Lysaght

Printed to accompany Lauren Lysaght’s exhibition The Niti Gini Collection, which was staged at City Gallery Wellington and the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland. Cunnane’s essay serves to tease out some of the deeper issues embedded in Lysaght’s personal tribute to her grandmother and the ceramic house of Crown Lynn. Cunnane threads connections between Lysaght’s work, the aesthetics of Victoriana and the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement, noting points of similarity, influence and divergence, while also highlighting the pervasive preoccupation with facets of collection and display that underscores all of Lysaght’s work.

Kei konei koe: ō tapuwae ki Tāmaki Makaurau
You are here: mapping Auckland

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Kei konei koe: ō tapuwae ki Tāmaki Makaurau You are here: mapping Auckland, which took place in the Pictorial Gallery of the Auckland War Memorial Museum from 30 September 2011 to 12 August 2012. The essays in this catalogue consider the epistemological function that maps have in our everyday lives. More specifically, the exhibition and accompanying essays look at the mapping history of Auckland and consider the subjective values that maps reveal; the continued ubiquity of maps in contemporary society; the knowledge and power that maps wield as well as the diversity of purpose and visual configuration of maps.

The publication features essays by Dr Cris de Groot, Kathy Waghorn, Dr Sarah Treadwell, Isabel Michell and Julie Senior along with photographs by Kryzsztof Pfeiffer.

Focusing on the diverse photographic oeuvre of one of New Zealand’s foremost pioneers of “art” photography in the post-war period, the publication accompanies the exhibition curated by Associate Professor Leonard Bell from the Art History Department, The University of Auckland and includes essays by both Bell and Anna Parlane. Frank Hofmann arrived in New Zealand in 1940 as a refugee from Nazism. He quickly established himself as a professional photographer, first in Christchurch, then in Auckland from 1941. In Auckland he initially worked for Clifton Firth, the most prominent photographer, and from 1948-75 for Christopher Bede Studios, the country’s largest commercial portrait business. This was Hofmann's day job. He also pursued art photography intensely, exploring the aesthetic and poetic potentialities of the medium in various genres: portraiture, experimental and abstract, architectural, and landscape. Besides being an outstanding photographer, Hofmann is particularly important historically for introducing inter-war European modernist ideas and practices into New Zealand.

The book covers the wide range of Hofmann’s photographic practice as well as focusing on the diversity of his interests and contributions to a lively, multi-disciplinary cultural scene that encompassed the visual arts, music, modernist architecture and literature. He photographed most of the leading figures of this milieu – conductors Georg Tintner and Juan Matteucci, musicians Lili Kraus and Valmai Moffat, painters Eric Lee Johnson and Louise Henderson, architects Vernon Brown and Ivan Juriss, and writers Frank Sargeson and A.R.D. Fairburn.

Published to coincide with a suite of photographic works that were completed during Chong’s residency at the McCahon House and exhibited at the Gus Fisher Gallery, this publication features an introduction by the artist and an essay by Victoria Wynne-Jones. The photographs produced during Chong’s residency take their departure point from eighteenth-century pantomimes and ballets as well as the theoretical dance treatises, dance histories and the beginnings of choreography that were published at this time. Renowned for her intricately beautiful and somewhat mesmeric pieces of hair-embroidery, the exhibition and accompanying texts showcase the new direction of Chong’s work, grounding her in the Early Modern world of dance and choreography that was centered on the movement of the body in space, on anatomy, geometry and printed symbols.

Published as the exhibition catalogue to accompany Professor Elizabeth Rankin’s exhibition of the same title that was held at the Gus Fisher Gallery in July and August of 2011, this publication serves to highlight the continued ability of printmaking to create forms that unite visual delight with social acuity.

The four artists in Collateral show that printmaking's long history of social and political critique is still alive and well. From the United States, New Zealand and South Africa, printmakers Daniel Heyman, Michael Reed, Sandra Thomson and Diane Victor utilise the versatility of print processes in diverse ways that offer the traditional pleasures of fine prints and also more unexpected forms: delicate etchings and drypoints, vibrant screenprint designs on a variety of fabric supports, ingenious artist's books, and engravings on metal. But this is not only an exhibition for print lovers: these artists share the impulse to expose human rights violations, and the different stories they tell invite close reading as they focus on those who suffer not as combatants or through direct involvement in conflict, but in what may be referred to as collateral damage.

Invited to witness interviews of Iraqi detainees by American human rights lawyers, Daniel Heyman (USA) sought to restore their individuality and dignity after endless humiliating exposure as victims in the media. He uses the directness of drypoint to capture likenesses of the men with rapid immediacy, adding the words of their testament in inscriptions that invade the spaces around their heads. Media reports also caught the attention of Diane Victor (SA), but in this case she was outraged by how little attention was given to public corruption and personal tragedies in post-apartheid South Africa. Her etchings reveal some of these Disasters of Peace, as she calls them, depicted in painstakingly delicate surfaces that compellingly draw us in to linger over events that viewers might otherwise avoid. Sandra Thomson (NZ) exploits the versatility of screenprinting to create linear forms reminiscent of medieval woodcuts in order to explore saintly stories and more contemporary incidents of suffering in the church. Working on fabric, she evokes the sumptuousness of religious vestments or references more humble apparel, such as the singlets she creates to suggest the vulnerability of abused children. Michael Reed (NZ) too uses fabric supports for many of his prints to convey a social imperative. He deploys the connotations of varied textiles – whether drapes, carpet runners, or bandages – to contribute additional layers of meaning to the transfixing texts imprinted on his works, indicting those who make and sell arms for profit.

Published in conjunction with the touring exhibition The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy that was curated by Gregory O’Brien and was at Gus Fisher Gallery in May of 2011, the book of the same title serves to showcase the charming and immensely entertaining artwork of expatriate New Zealand illustrator, designer and typographer Graham Percy (1938–2008). It draws on the artist’s comprehensive collection of work: not only his published drawings but also his many works created for family and friends. These illustrations and ‘imagined histories’ depict an eclectic host of characters who go about their activities with strangely serene and determined attitudes — a Venetian kiwi complete with masquerade mask, Sigmund Freud in Dargaville, and Johann Strauss envisaged as a hot air balloon.

The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy traces the story of micronaut Percy who travelled far and built a career on the closely observed detail. Born in Taranaki in 1938, Percy spent apprentice years in Auckland before moving to London, where with his photographer-partner Mari Mahr he created a workshop-home, a microcosm of the outside world. Here fellow-venturer Gregory O’Brien presents an account of Graham Percy’s life and art, by way of motorbike and hot-air balloon, through sketches and bookshelves, touching on childhood losses and adult nostalgia. Including some of Percy’s most compelling drawings, A Micronaut in the Wide World showcases his early design work, vivid children’s book illustration and thriving mature art. The drawings reveal Percy’s passion for the small and hand-drawn; convey quirky remembered and imagined histories; and feature a cast of curious characters, from storks and trainee running targets to Commedia dell’Arte characters and illustrious composers. In its vivid, exuberant detail — alphabets and elephants, red lettuces and homesick kiwi, the Hungarian navy and the starry skies of the southern hemisphere — A Micronaut in the Wide World is a stimulating rediscovery of a remarkable artist.

Nuala Gregory: Exploded View
For her exhibition Exploded View, Associate Professor Nuala Gregory from the Elam School of Fine Arts created an immersive installation of printed and collaged works. Her artwork draws on her investigations in art theory, advancing the proposition that art can produce effects which escape the bounds of representation and operated instead at the level of bodily sensation. The work for this exhibition was produced using liquid-wash printmaking processes (both stone and plate lithography) combined with elements of collage. It was conceived in the form of an installation. Nevertheless, it is an exhibition of paintings about painting: about its histories, particularities and possibilities. Gregory proposes that art can produce direct bodily effects that escape cognitive grasp. Her exhibitions are immersive ‘painted’ environments in which colour and form, in all their simplicity, challenge our capacity for conceptual mastery. They leave us with a memory of sensation that can only be ‘understood’ through an active deployment: recreating or re-applying it within everyday experience. The catalogue for this exhibition documents these process-based explorations and includes essays by Dr. Peter Shand of The University of Auckland, who provides a historical and theoretical context for the work, and art critic, curator and poet Gregory O’Brien, who reflects on its formless, withdrawn mood and feel. It is that mood and feel that mark the beginning of the painting’s work.

Looking Terrific: The Story of El Jay, by Doris de Pont
Celebrating the achievements of New Zealand fashion industry leader Gus Fisher who headed the House of El Jay in New Zealand for almost 50 years, this publication accompanies the exhibition curated by acclaimed Auckland designer Doris de Pont. Gus Fisher’s generous support of the arts has been recognised with his recent Arts Foundation of New Zealand Award for Patronage, but his role in developing the fashion industry in New Zealand is less well-known today. He contributed to broadening the New Zealand fashion perspective by looking to the couture of Paris, interpreting it and making his own version of European style available to women here. Travelling to Paris every year for the fashion shows, he saw first-hand the new designs and fabrics which led to a keen awareness of the latest trends. The relationships he established with Parisian couturiers led to El Jay becoming the New Zealand licensee for Christian Dior, making Gus Fisher a world pioneer in gaining the exclusive right to manufacture and sell Dior originals in the New Zealand market. Co-published with the New Zealand Fashion Museum to mark their inaugural exhibition. Also includes an essay by Angela Lassig and foreword by Linda Tyler.

Geoff Thornley: Constructions 1978-1982
Geoff Thornley is one of few New Zealand painters to have never deviated from pure abstraction since he adopted the mode 30 years ago. In contrast to the illusionary effects and painterly pools of light and texture of other series of his works, the Constructions are a group of concrete physical forms. They come from a discrete period within Thornley's career and curator William McAloon selected 19 works for the exhibition, many shown for the first time, and discusses their development with Thornley in this publication. Allan Smith and Morgan Thomas also contribute essays and all works from the exhibition are given full-page reproductions.

Rohan Wealleans: Let's Make the Fire Turn Green
Rohan Wealleans' works are at once colossal and intricate, gruesome and beautiful. Let's Make the Fire Turn Green, a Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Hocken Collections - Uare Taoka O Hakena publication, explores the several bodies of work the artist produced during his 2005 Frances Hodgkins Fellowship year in Dunedin. Enough, in fact, to produce five distinct solo exhibitions. Featuring a distinctive die-cut cover and essays by Justin Paton and Linda Tyler.

Gordon H. Brown: Hotel North America
Brown became Director of the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui in 1974, making a trip to North America to study exhibition design. Using up the film in his camera at the end of each day, he made a study of each hotel that he stayed in. Like the objects in the exhibition halls, the furniture and fittings of the hotel rooms were put on display in these photographs, as Linda Tyler explains in the catalogue essay.

Moving Still
Curated by Paul McNamara, Moving Still presents a selection of works by New Zealand and Australian photographers that move in the ineffable space between stillness and movement. Most of the exhibited works are based on the photographer's desire to capture a sense of motion, despite photographs being, according to Susan Sontag, "a neat slice of time". When the camera shutter opens, the world and its image are one - the shutter closes, the world moves on. Artists include: Peter Black, Gary Blackman, Rhondda Bosworth, Elaine Campaner, Ben Cauchi, Darren Glass, Gavin Hipkins, Len Lye, Anne Noble, Trent Parke, Max Oettli, Patrick Reynolds, Natalie Robertson and Ann Shelton. Bryant's essay examines the filmic sub-texts of the exhibition, comparing the 24 frames-per-second of cinema with the still moment of photography.

Stephen Farthing: Leaf to Leopard
Over the course of a two week Hood Fellowship at The University of Auckland, the artist (Rootstein Hopkins Professor of Drawing at the University of London) took it upon himself to learn to draw by following the instructions of Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Entitled "Leaf to Leopard: A Practical Guide to John Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing", this publication illustrates the 31-piece collection that he created, reflecting the techniques, tools and tips offered to would-be artists in the 19th century. Professor Farthing's account of his study is complemented by an essay by Nuala Gregory, Associate Dean Academic in the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, who considers the practice of drawing through the lens of post-structural theorist Gilles Deleuze. Introduced with a foreword by Dean of the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, Professor Sharman Pretty.

Julian Hooper: Liliu
First produced for turbulence: the 3rd Auckland Triennial, (organised by Auckland Art Gallery) in March 2007. An essay by Linda Tyler chronicles Hooper's journey into family history, and accompanying images from the installation show how this art is weighted with the larger inheritance of colonialism. Motifs and symbols from the Austro-Hungarian Empire clash and blend with Tongan and Fijian imagery and ideas, suggesting conflict and assimilation in the construction of Pacific identity on both a personal and cultural level.

Peter Gibson Smith: Speaking of Tongues
By using a computer's logic to give him the building blocks for his art, Gibson Smith's intent is to reinterpret new technologies through old technologies - those of writing and painting itself. All of the art works in his installation at the Gus Fisher Gallery were funded by a New Staff Research Grant from The University of Auckland, and used computers and machines in their conception and production, but also traditional painting materials and methods. Linda Tyler gives a short commentary on the evolution of the works and their presentation in the gallery.

James Ross: The Red Studio, Small Paintings and sculpture 1982-2006
James Ross's exhibition The Red Studio explores the artist's work of the last 25 years through the 'chromatic constant' red, providing the viewer with a lens with which to view the entirety of Ross's painting activity from the period 1982-2006. As exhibition curator Luke Smythe explains in his catalogue essay, for 25 years now James Ross has been exploring the fertile zone of artistic production that lies between painting and sculpture. Unconventional supports have long been important to Ross, who from the beginning of his career was eager to jettison the omnipresent rectangular canvas that dominated the modern Western painting tradition. Essay by Luke Smythe, introduction by Laurence Simmons, published by Globe Editions.

George Chance: Improving Nature
Illustrated with four sepia images by the famous pictorialist photographer George Chance (including The Resting Team and Maori Maids at Rotorua) with a short informative essay by Linda Tyler, this catalogue is beautifully designed by Jacinda Torrance of Verso Visual and as collectible as the works themselves.

Lara Strongman [ed.] Julian Dashper/John Nixon: The World is your Studio
Curator's foreword by Ben Curnow and an extensive essay on the two artists by Manukau School of Visual Arts lecturer Mark Kirby. Nattily designed by Toby Curnow and Helen Hume with lavish colour plates of the installations, this is an excellent summary of collaborative projects by this dynamic duo - including photographs of each artist holding a first-born child - from the years 1996 to 2004. Chronologies of each artist at the back are filled with fascinating details of personal history and amusing anecdotes stretching back to teenage years.

Ed Hanfling and Alan Wright [eds.] Vuletic and his Circle
Beautifully designed catalogue about the art and artists promoted by the most uncompromising New Zealand gallerist of the twentieth century, Petar Vuletic. Full colour plate section studded with works by Stephen Bambury, Roy Good, Richard Killeen, Ron Left, Milan Mrkusich, Philip O'Sullivan, Ian Scott, Geoff Thornley, Gordon Walters and one of the curators - Alan Wright. Thoroughly researched exhibition history 1972-1976. Includes much mention of Clement Greenberg in the highly readable essays Striving for Quality: The Development and Diversity of Abstraction at the Petar/James Gallery and Clement or Clemency? Vuletic: The Critical Stance. Catalogue supported by The Fletcher Trust, Dayle Mace, Jenny Gibbs and InHouse Design.

Lara Strongman [ed.] Walters: En Abyme
Paintings, collages, sketches and drawings on paper that are examples of "en abyme" - the representation of an image within an image - are illuminated by essay by Francis Pound prefaced by an introductory essay to Gordon Walters written by Leonard Bell. Catalogue supported by a Creative New Zealand grant.

Philip Dadson: Polar Projects
"In these Dry Valleys, the living communities consist of stone and ice. The sound continuum is silence, broken into by the birth of a rock onto a surface littered with jutting boulders, rocks, stones, gravel and sand" wrote Phil Dadson in his diary in the Garwood Dry Valley in Antarctica in 2003. Andrew Clifford explains how Dadson created instruments out of what was there and mediates between literal polar extremes, pacing to and fro and producing surprisingly sonic ways of seeing.

Lisa Crowley: Garden City
A thousand words by Allan Smith and many pictures of Cairo by outstanding Auckland photographer, Critical Studies lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts and new mother, Lisa Crowley.

Caroline Rothwell: Elsewhere
Resident at the Lakeside Arts Centre at The University of Nottingham for three months over winter in 2002, Elam School of Fine Arts MFA Sculpture graduate Caroline Rothwell made an extensive study of weeds. A brief meditation on undesirable plants by Nicholas Alfrey, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Nottingham accompanies six full colour illustrations of Rothwell's vinyl on PVC Weed Garden.

Dead Ringer: The Duplicitous Image
Mirror images and doppelgangers are tackled by curator Robin Stoney in a short essay which sits alongside Gwyn Porter's Bare Bones, a useful stitching together of theory (Walter Benjamin, JG Ballard, Paul Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari) which is cunningly lashed on to the work of photographers Ann Shelton, Darren Glass and Joyce Campbell. Shelton's Hanging Rock and Glass' Rangitoto Battery are reproduced in colour with a smoky b&w cover by Joyce Campbell.

Rose Nolan/Marco Fusinato
Formalist abstract painter Simon Ingram writes engagingly on Marco Fusinato's formalist abstract paintings suggesting that a video projection of an improvisation with electric guitar could be a synaesthetic model for the possibilities of formalist art. Allan Smith tackles the block lettering of Rose Nolan's retro-Constructivist wall paintings in his essay "From Russia with Love or Moments and Monuments of a Happy Revolution". Both Nolan and Fusinato were Artists in Residence at the Elam School of Fine Arts in 2002.

Gavin Hipkins: The Colony
New Zealand's contribution to the 25th Sao Paulo Biennial
16 colour photographs of innocuous polystyrene balls and a short excursion into subtexts of post-colonial hell and horror which can be read into them by Robert Leonard. The artist's own architectural interests come to the fore in his explanation of his photographs as a celebration of a failed movement for geodesic dome proliferation. Installation photographs show how the amassed images should be hung to resemble a city skyline.

Anni Albers: Designer, Weaver, Printmaker
Nine photographs of screenprints from the collection of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation with an essay about Albers' escape from stifling bourgeois family life to the wilds of the Bauhaus by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut.

William Kentridge: Stereoscope
Elizabeth Rankin tackles the work of this Johannesburg artist, actor, director and filmmaker explaining the political as well as the art historical background in an essay alliteratively titled Paradox, Parody and the Prosaic.

The Colonial View: Watercolours from the Fletcher Trust Art Collection
Illustrated by ten images which show the usual range of nineteenth century New Zealand preoccupations: soldiering, big houses, harbours, Maori girls, sunsets and Mitre Peak, this catalogue is in full colour. Curator Peter Shaw explains the origin and importance of this private collection and the business of colonisation itself in a short essay.

Mladen Stilinovic: White Absence
Conceptual Croatian artist Mladen Stilinovic's response to the collapse of Communism was an insistence on the importance of laziness in artmaking practice as Wystan Curnow explains in his foreword. White is the colour of silence, writes the artist, quoted by Branka Stipancic in a short note on the relationship between monochrome and pain.

Diversions: Recent Acquisitions from The University Art Collection
Michael Dunn briefly outlines the what, when, who and why of The University of Auckland Art Collection and there are biographical notes on the sixteen artists featured in the exhibition. Illustrated with colour images of work by Max Gimblett, Paul Hartigan, Peter Peryer, Glenda Vilasoni and Emily Wolfe.