Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Day for night ‘The Members’ 2, Swan or Snake, Western Springs - Greta Anderson

Buying committee;
Gretchen
Blair
Kathryn

Purchased end of 2015

Motus 6 - Jeena Shin

The paperfold is a dynamic artefact, unstable and evolving.’

Jeena Shin’s paintings critically examine the spatial properties that inhere in a reticulated network of fold lines. They also probe the visual and spatial resonances produced by varying the intensities of a single colour. Her works acknowledge that colour is deceptive, relative, and duplicitous. The artist is keenly aware of what Josef Albers has already noted, ‘with colour we do not see what we see. Because colour, as the most relative medium in art has innumerable faces or appearances’.2

Whilst meticulously crafted by hand, the subject matter of Shin’s paintings exemplify the propensity for ‘Shiftiness’ found within the digital design realm. Her collections of planes overlay one another, so that interior and exterior spaces are seamlessly enfolded. Her works also reveal multiple viewpoints concurrently.

Dependent upon the location of the viewer and the changing intensity of natural light, Shin’s work reveals or conceals particular qualities of the paintings.3 From a substantial distance, the works resemble monolithic monochromes. However, viewed at a middle distance, the reticulated network of folded planes and the surfaces formed between them are disclosed. Close up, one can admire the taut, polished finish of the painted surfaces and the thick, immaculately rendered crease lines formed by the accumulated layers of pigment.

Shin’s works probe the interstitial spaces found within folded surfaces. Contingent upon viewer position, their undulating, serpentine forms are revealed or concealed from view. Through her strategic deployment of the oblique, Shin generates painterly spaces of rich complexity.
Buying committee:
Blair
Gretchen
Kathryn


Purchased 2016

Moonlight Night - Gretchen Albrecht

Gretchen Albrecht graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts with Honours in 1963 and quickly established herself as a leading artist in New Zealand: her first solo exhibition in 1964 was opened by Colin McCahon. Albrecht has created new work and exhibited extensively in New Zealand and internationally for five decades, continuing her investigation into the endless possibilities of abstraction: a testament to her sustained artistic and spiritual explorations.
Albrecht’s paintings combine formal and physical qualities - a sensuous colour palette counterpoints rhythmic patterns of proportion, scale, shape, line and texture. The tactile quality of the work with its assured swirling brushstrokes resonate with allusions to an inward sense of order and the underlying rhythms of nature, creating work that revels in the joy of painting.
Since the 1970s, Albrecht's work has evolved from the poured acrylic 'stained canvases' for which she first gained widespread recognition, into a pair of signature 'shaped-canvas' formats: the hemisphere (half circle) and the oval. These are shapes that Albrecht associates with particular meanings and states of mind. In the shaped canvas paintings she has been producing since the early 1980s, resonant combinations of colour and geometry create images with a clear poetic impulse, in which references to architecture, art history, landscape, family and the cosmos act as emotional points of departure.
Albrecht's artistic horizons have broadened in recent years, to encompass large-scale stainless steel sculpture and the inception of a series of multi-paneled rectangular
paintings featuring an inner rectangular ‘threshold' motif. In 2009 Albrecht began working on a new series of rectangular paintings featuring oval-shaped vortices of colour combined with slender horizontal geometric figures. Albrecht continues to
develop her ideas using the hemisphere, oval and the newly added rectangle.
 
Buying Committee :
Blair
Gretchen
Kathryn
 
Purchase February 2016