Auguste Rodin's famous sculpture The Kiss - carved in marble weighs in at about 3.5 tonnes.
Auguste Rodin's famous sculpture The Kiss - carved in marble weighs in at about 3.5 tonnes.
The spectacularly extended Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki is the pivot around which art in Auckland turns and next year it hosts one of the largest touring exhibitions we have seen for some time.
Staged by a partnership between The Tate, London, and the Art Gallery of New SouthWales (AGNSW), The Body Laid Bare: Masterpieces from Tate is co-curated between Emma Chambers, curator at the Tate, and New Zealander Justin Paton now head of International Art at the AGNSW.
There are more than 100 major representations of the nude in paintings, sculpture, photographs and prints; Auguste Rodin's famous sculpture of erotic love The Kiss - carved in marble and weighing in at about 3.5 tonnes - is one of the main attractions.
The wonderful Orientalism, in 1997, was the last time the gallery co-operated on a major exhibition with the New South Wales gallery. A number of pieces didn't make it across the Tasman, notably The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, a huge painting by Edward Poynter, which could not be got through the Gallery doors.
Detail from Pablo Picasso's Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, one of the paintings featured in The Body Laid Bare: Masterpieces from Tate.
I hope the entire exhibition makes it this time and the renovated gallery can cope with the weighty Rodin. The show includes opulent paintings by Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard and a wonderful arched nude figure by Louise Bourgeois as well as a delightful role-reversal painting by Sylvia Sleigh. One of Stanley Spencer's late iconic works of himself and his wife will be the most shocking piece as he paints nakedness, not nudity.
Auckland Art Gallery will also welcome the installation of a commissioned work by Judy Millar on its staircase. Building and safety regulations have held it up a little but it should be lively and surprising.
The early part of 2017 will also see the two photographic exhibitions at the gallery continue for several months. One show, The Us in I, by various New Zealand photographers, takes us back to the 1940s-80s and documents concerns with such things as the Hikoi, life on the streets, rural life and working men. The other, Ann Shelton's Dark Matter, continues until April and is moodier. Her technically brilliant prints are often of scenes associated with death, decay, madness and social misfits.
Artspace has also tended to have shows, mostly video, dealing with similar subjects. Yet it was undeniable that the director, Misal Adnan Yildiz, who ends his three-year term early next year, brought to the position energy, international experience and passionate sympathy for politics and outsider groups. His reshaping of the gallery space will survive his term and I hope his commitment and his desire to shock viewers into facing realities on the fringe of radicalism will survive.
Auckland has an extraordinary number of dealer art galleries; at least a dozen galleries each week show from artists new work ranging from quiet evocations of domestic interiors through classical minimalist abstraction to wild Expressionism and remarkable installation in all sorts of inventive mediums. The coming year may see changes in this art market as money shifts to the substantial growth of specialist art auction companies.
The younger generation of artists coming out of the art schools, where originality at all costs is preached and traditional skills less emphasised, have turned substantially to video art, installations and performance art.
Concept has become supreme, often inspired by literature on art and by reference to the past which has dominated thinking. In some measure, skills in drawing and painting have been played down. The finalists for the 2016 Walters Prize were all video; installations with the merest thread of narrative.
Detail from Andre Hemer's Wallace Art Awards winning painting, Big Node#10
The Wallace Awards have mostly gone to painters and the Pah Homestead, the TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre supported by Sir James Wallace and home to his collection, will continue to be a popular place to take visitors to a range of exhibitions.
The Wallace Prize was won by Andre Hemer with a work remarkable for its surface achieved by a variety of means that can never be entirely caught in a photograph. Hemer's international career is blooming and his emphasis on surface has proved abstract art is not dead.
