In Conversation with the Past

The gallery will stage five discreet projects each with their own approach to the re-visioning of historical material.

Upstairs The Labours of Herakles, the touring exhibition of lithographs and etchings by Marian Maguire, casts the archetypal hero as New Zealand colonist. This exhibition of prints will be accompanied by the presentation of seven precious Attic vases, illustrating scenes from the life of Herakles and collated from various museum collections across the country by Victoria University Senior Lecturer in Classics, Judy Deuling.

Downstairs an exhibition curated jointly by David Maskill, Senior Lecturer in Art History at Victoria University, and his honours-year postgraduate students looks closely at the artist prints published in the 19th century French journal Gazette des Beaux Arts(1859 -1930) held by the university’s library. This student-focussed curatorial project presents a historical account on the journal and its influence in disseminating knowledge of European printmaking.

The fourth exhibition presents Bible Studies (New Testament) a new body of work by New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins that brings into play a commentary on the retrograde of religious iconography with sampled texts from Goethe’s tragedy Faust. Based on a children’s bible published in 1968–the year the artist was born–this series of fourteen large-scale digital photographs montages embroidered patches on top of inverted religious imagery, creating a psychedelic effect of Pop-Gothic sensibility.

For the last exhibition in the series of five projects, the Adam Art Gallery pays tribute to New Zealand artist Julian Dashper. Two works by the artist recently acquired by the Victoria University’s Art Collection will be showcased in the gallery, both based on a catalogue to the Van Gogh exhibition the artist saw as a boy in Auckland in the 1970s.

The whole suite of shows is entitled Source Material - Five Conversations with the Past.

 Adam Art Gallery Director Christina Barton says ‘Source Material is a series of exhibitions that celebrates the activities of the university in unearthing and re-interpreting the collected image as well as showing how artists also rework images and stories from the past to layer myth with meaning and reference with allusion’.

The Adam Art Gallery has published two catalogues to accompany the exhibitions including a catalogue with essays written by the student curators of the Art History project and a publication on the work of Gavin Hipkins including essays by Director of the Adam Art Gallery and Senior Lecturer in Art History Christina Barton and predominant Australian Art Historian Rex Butler.

An informative public programme including exhibition tours, a film programme on the character of Herakles and a forum discussion on the legacy of narrative within visual culture will expand on the exhibitions and their conversations with the past.