ARTS & CULTURE

Goat Island or Te Hawere-a-Maki, the marine reserve, close to Richard's studio

@ OREXART RICHARD ADAMS

GOAT ISLAND PAINTINGS

November 2022

There's an intersection where realistic landscape painting and abstraction meet and exchange ideas. One tells us in a literal way (realism) what we are seeing, the other (abstraction) invites us to imagine what we are seeing, given a set of cues that can invoke perhaps a 'landscape' reading of the work.

Richard Adams is also well known as a musician (jazz violinist with Nairobi Trio). All of this has its parallels in music and these paintings, one could say, have a 'musical' feel to them; a rhythm, light and shade, arioso to capriccio.  PN

OREXART, 221 Ponsonby Road, E: gallery@rexart.co.nz www.orexart.co.nz

All Paintings on Canvas, 1210 x 915mm Goat Island 1

@ BERGMAN GALLERY

Aotearoa Art Fair General Entry Thurs 17 - Sun 20 November

Bergman Gallery returns to the Aotearoa Art Fair, Auckland, New Zealand. Featuring artists Tungane Broadbent, Reuben Paterson, Mahiriki Tangaroa, Benjamin Work, Telly Tuita, Nina Oberg Humpries, Shannon Novak, Sēmisi Fetokai Potauiane, Heather Straka, Gavin Jones, Raymond Sagapolutele, and Sylvia Marsters.

Sylvia Marsters E Moemoea Naku, A Dream of Mine 29 October – 26 November

Tungane Broadbent and Reuben Paterson

Sylvia Marsters - E Moemoea Naku, A Dream of Mine, brings the artist’s practice full circle as lush tropical hibiscus paintings are presented alongside her iconic gardenia canvases. For much of her youth, the artist was thrilled with tales of her father’s island in the Pacific, stories that ultimately became represented by the flora that she paints. Elements of realism blend with concepts of romanticism and perceptions of Pacific fantasy in these new compositions, structuring a sense of serenity and compelling attraction.

Instagram and Facebook @bergmangallery

Sylvia Marsters, Small Wonder, oil on fine linen, 310 x 410mm, 2022

BERGMAN GALLERY, 3/582 Karangahape Road (Entrance via 2 Newton Road), T: 021 024 614, E: benny@bergmangallery.com Open Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5:30pm, www.bergmangallery.com

ARTS + CULTURE @SCOTT LAWRIE GALLERY NICHOLAS IVES: NATURAL INTENSITIES…

Although he’s based in Naarm/Melbourne, the painter Nicholas Ives has been a favourite with collectors here in Aotearoa for over five years now.

His last two shows sold out and this one – his fourth solo with the gallery – is utterly sublime.

Nic’s focus has gone into deeply personal territory for this show, exploring the nuances of fatherhood, childhood, innocence, and hope – finding inspiration in the daily life of his little boy. But this doesn't mean the show veers into twee sentimentality.

Nic opens up a deep enquiry into how ideas are physically formed through the act of painting; quite literally deconstructing the fragments of painterly form.

As Nic explains, “I tend to keep track of all the little ideas I read and stumble upon as I work. These build up a little like the scattered marks and surfaces of the paintings themselves. I settled on the title ‘Natural Intensities’ as I enjoyed the description here of an intensity as a possibility, an idea, not formed, but an organic potential of a particular context.

The works seemed to have that quality, naturally ‘becoming’ across the surface. The works all sort of hum and vibe… the simple hint of a figure, mostly marks, and a few lines to pull the form out. There are ideas I'm trying to approach here, of subject and object relations that I’m keen to keep exploring.”

In the second space, we’re welcoming another Naarm based artist, Ara Dolatian, whose sensational ceramics have delighted audiences in Australia and beyond. While emerging artist Marie Strauss will also show an elegant collection of recent prints and ceramics. Lots of beautiful work to see!

Open Tuesday to Saturday 11am-5pm, until 12 November. All welcome!

Ara Dolatian, Enlil, 2022 © The artist Nicholas Ives, Into the Ground, 2022 © The artist

Marie Strauss, The Catch, 2022 © The artist

Peter Peryer – Wanted Dead or Alive 9 November - 26 November

{Suite} is delighted to present Wanted Dead or Alive, a solo exhibition of work by the late Peter Peryer who is among New Zealand’s most iconic contemporary photographers. Having begun his practice later on in life, Peryer was largely self-taught and developed a singular style that marked him apart from his contemporaries.

Captured with meticulous care and formal focus, Peryer’s photography entombs excerpts of the everyday in a world of his own creation, transmogrifying commonplace objects into psychologically charged studies that resist straightforward interpretation.

Wanted Dead or Alive features a suite of animal photographs; a subject matter which the artist returned to throughout his practice. However, as often occurs in Peryer’s work, not all is as it seems at first glance. His images play on themes of duplicity and doubleness, prompting viewers to consider the permeable relationship between nature and artifice. Are the animals depicted dead or alive? Are they real or artificial; and what new meaning comes to bear once the viewer decides either way?

Through intimate focus, distorted scale, and carefully arranged compositions, Peryer complicates this decision-making process, forcing us to continuously question the nature of his subjects.

While thematic undertones persist across Peryer’s body of work, each photograph is distinct and possesses its own unique presence. They are united, however, by a shared uncanniness. Whether the bust of an owl, portrait of a peacock, or profile of a rhinoceros, Peryer captures what is recognisable and renders it unfamiliar, ever testing the ways of seeing.

Owl, 2003, inkjet print, ed. 5, 150 x 200mm

ARTS + CULTURE MESSINI PALACE @ PONSONBY CENTRAL

Messini Palace (Ngati Apakura) is a cast artist merging traditional whakairo rakau (Māori wood carving) with contemporary mediums such as resin and stone.

Each piece is individually handmade and therefore unique. Some pieces are limited edition due to the mould making process and time involved. Together with an engaging colour palette this contemporary urban aesthetic on traditional Toi Māori makes her work accessible for everyone to enjoy.

Located for a week at Ponsonby Central, this is a chance to view and purchase her new pieces including small sculpture, wall art, wall art lighting and object de art.

This pop-up exhibition is a great opportunity to meet the artist in residence for the week and runs from Monday 7 November, with an opening night Tuesday 8 November from 6pm to 10pm. Nau mai, Haere mai.

Opening hours: 10am to 7.30pm. Monday to Sunday, 7-13 November.

Ponsonby Central shop D, 136-146 Ponsonby Road. Instagram: messinipalaceart

Supported by Glengarry Wines Ponsonby, Countdown Ponsonby - 'Proudly supporting local artists in our community'

PURE MAGIC AT PITT ST THEATRE

Plumb Theatre presents Mike Barlett’s festive-hit Snowflake.

This November Plumb Theatre is thrilled to present the New Zealand premiere of the critically acclaimed festive hit Snowflake. Written by Laurence Olivier Award-winning playwright Mike Bartlett (King Charles III, Doctor Foster), Snowflake stars Michael Lawrence (Simpatico), Layla Pitt (Po’ Boys and Oysters) and Clementine Mills (Stop Kiss).

Led by director Paul Gittins (Collected Stories, Faith Healer), Snowflake is a heartfelt cry for reconciliation and understanding in the current climate of polarisation and intolerance. “It cuts straight to the heart of everything that’s happening in our world at the moment through the clever lens of a father-daughter conflict,” says Gittins.

Andy, played by Michael Lawrence, is a nostalgic boomer, widower and father; he loves a pint down the pub and listening to albums from beginning to end. His twenty-one year old daughter Maya (Clementine Mills) left home three years ago and hasn’t spoken to him since. It’s Christmas Eve and Andy hears Maya is back in town. Fuelled with fresh hope, Andy fits out the local church hall for a welcome home and waits.

“Christmas... that’s when they say people come home...” Heart-warming, topical and thoughtful, Bartlett’s bittersweet Christmas play Snowflake explores generational conflict, baby boomer vs millennial values and the struggle to find common ground. Snowflake showcases lighting design from Michael Goodwin. Get into the Christmas spirit at Pitt St Theatre and book your tickets today through iTICKET.

Plumb Theatre gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Chisholm Whitney Charitable Trust and Auckland Council in the presentation of this work. “it’s rather special” - What’s on Stage “devastatingly insightful” - The Stage

Snowflake by Mike Bartlett, Direction from Paul Gittins Performance by Michael Lawrence, Layla Pitt and Clementine Mills. Pitt St Theatre, 78 Pitt St, Newton 23 November – 11 December Tickets: iticket.co.nz or 09 361 1000

How we see ourselves is often puzzled over in figurative painting, its reflective format often the size of a mirror.

Now 70, former Head of Painting at Christchurch’s Ilam, Roger Boyce looks closely at his hands. Picasso remarked that he trusts his hands more than his brain, as after a lifetime of action, our hands develop an intuitive response while our analytical brain just gets in the way.

Boyce’s exhibition House of Games at {Suite} on Ponsonby Road has a wall full of works, each around the size of a small bathroom mirror, reflecting on the skills his hands reliably demonstrate.

Boyce’s hands drip with white fluid, the colour of the jobbing house painter. They’re dipped in the red, green, and blue of projected light’s primary colours, the opposite of the physics a painter uses to make hues. Poking from behind a floating sheet his hand gives a one-fingered salute, as if his ghost has a final message. They gesture in gold like a Buddhist statue, insert a finger to explore the red world of a jelly.

The size of a more generous mirror, and with the pale, silver greys of its acute reflections, the works of Marilyn Murphy’s Drawn From Life at Orexart show us lost in the clouds of consumerist nostalgia and surreal interactions. Murphy was Professor of Art at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University, now living between the USA and Whangarei, and this is her first exhibition in New Zealand.

Rendered in the monotones of graphite, these drawings reference print advertising from last century, the fashion especially nostalgic while clues in the pictures hint at contemporary concerns. New Zealand appears like a magnified map in a giant jelly mould, seedlings planted around its base. A farmer waits for a city block to impact his paddock. Clouds are everywhere, emerging from boxes and toothpaste tubes, engulfing us.

How we see ourselves is unknown to others, and how others see us is also opaque. Perhaps it is in the work of artists that we can catch glimpses of these various and variegated points of view. EVAN WOODRUFFE, Studio Art Supplies  PN

Roger Boyce's Not St Thomas at Suite Gallery

www.studioart.co.nz

Marilyn Murphy's Pacific Jelly Mould at Orexart Marilyn Murphy's Brighter Days at Orexart