Artists abandoned painting with recognizable objects and scenes from everyday life, instead focusing on shape, form, color, branding creation, and the materials used in the artistic process. Abstract art can be a deeply personal experience for both the artist and the viewer.
Taken from the collection of Christchurch Art Gallery, Untitled #1050, exhibition open until 14 October 2018, brings together abstract works by some of Aotearoa New Zealand's leading artists – from the austere, geometric precision of Gordon Walters and Don Driver to the spontaneously expressive paintings of Gretchen Albrecht, Ralph Hotere and Colin McCahon.
For the exhibition Untitled # 1050 (November 25, 2017 – October 14, 2018) this work was exhibited with the following caption:
“Abstraction or non-figuration is very liberating as you are able to talk about anything without the problem of depicting figurative images blocking you. “I can roam freely in all directions and pick up the layers I need in the painting so that the content is revealed in all these many different layers that come into it through color and movement, shape and rhythm and all the tools of the painter. ”
In his Color Field Series: “They are highly considered paintings, but my way of handling paint allows them a seemingly spontaneous look. Of course, it is, in a sense, totally spontaneous because I rarely go into the freshly stretched canvas with a predetermined idea in my head. […] The gestural physicality of my process means I can let everything grow organically as the painting dictates where it wants to go. ”
Furthermore, there are:
Gordon Walters
“The shape I use in my painting is not actually the Māori koru; I think about it in terms of a line ending in a circle and then sometimes I break it. I use free circles. What I have done to the form is just to push it in a direction of geometry so that in my painting I can have not only a positive negative effect of black and white, but also a work of vertical and horizontal which is equally important. ”
Milan Mrkusich
“The density of the surface comes from the artist's touch, and touch is, in my opinion, the most important thing in art. It provides the identity of the work and the identity of the artist. The surfaces […] and their uniqueness, I think, are my uniqueness, which was determined by the painting I did for several years and coming up with a solution to all the problems I had. “I think all art, if it is to have values, must have universal values. And what these universal values \uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbare hard to put into words. I think maybe the artwork gives us some hint of sublime feeling, and that's a romantic thing. It is the idea that God is in nature, because even if these works are not like nature, they are like nature. ”
Ralph Hotere
“There are few things I can say about my work that are better than saying nothing.”
Don Driver
This work was exhibited with the following label: “I try to create tensions between colours, shapes, shadows and reflections to create simplicity and ambiguity. […] I don't like my painting to be evocative but something to look at by itself. It's a combination of flat surfaces and colors that nestle against each other. ”
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