Out of This World

ST PAUL St Gallery is proud to present Out of This World, a major international exhibition with works by Colin McCahon (NZ), Vija Celmins (USA/Latvia), Jorge Molder (Potugal), Linda Quinlan (Ireland), Peter Rösel (Germany), Ben Rivers (Great Britain), Thomas Ruff (Germany) and James Turrell (USA).

In 1974, New Zealand painter Colin McCahon created Comet (series F8/9/10), the same year the comet Kohoutek passed over New Zealand. The comet, coming out of the depths of the galaxy and returning into them, became an image for an encounter with a phenomenon exceeding the human imagination. Explicable as an astronomical event, the comet remains nevertheless beyond our comprehension. Taking place during the International Year of Astronomy, Out of This World explores the undeniable fact that human beings are constantly faced with things that exceed their comprehension. It addresses the human desire for the sublime that persists in an age of rationalism.

In addition to Colin McCahon’s Comet (series F8/9/10), on loan from the Auckland Art Gallery, the exhibition will include art works from internationally renowned artists rarely seen in New Zealand. Their work balances between modernist scepticism and a simple acknowledgement of the factuality of the sublime. They transform the sublime into the mundane and back again until it is impossible to decide whether the work denotes an actual event or an imagined occurrence.

Like Colin McCahon’s work, Linda Quinlan’s work is a response to a passing comet, McNaught, which could be seen over Tasmania in 2007. Unable to shoot the comet, she decided to produce an image of McNaught by herself, creating a mesmerizing DIY version of this grand event. This recreation or simulation of a real event continues through the art works in the exhibition. Vija Celmins’ extraordinary etchings and wood cuts of seascapes and night skies blur the seen and the imagined. Thomas Ruff amends photographs of the night sky that are purchased from the European Southern Observatory. His sole contribution consists of adding one spot, or star. The beholder is unable to identify the artist’s manipulation of the original image and is lost in ambivalence between trust and doubt, belief and scepticism.

Peter Rösel is concerned with a similar matter, but his night sky painting pushes the play between the sublime and the mundane even further. What appears to represent stars, are drips of toothpaste, sprayed on the black painted canvas with a toothbrush. While Ruff leaves the beholder in a state between belief and disbelief, Rösel produces his images with the background of a radical constructivism: The world is how we see it (and how we want to see it). If the sublime is there, it is in us that it originates.

The search for the sublime is captured in Ben River’s film The Coming Race. Through the fog in a mountain scape, shadows of people gradually become visible. Hundreds and hundreds of people making their way towards an invisible and unknown destination, ignoring the inhospitality of the cold and rain drenched landscape. James Turell manipulates light and holographic processes to capture the sublime, creating perceptual volumes that surround the spectator in an immaterial, intangible beauty. The sublime appears as a haunting menace in Jorge Molder’s video installation Vasistas in which the image of a man seems to jump down from the ceiling, crossing the border between virtual and real space. There is no explanation for the man’s appearance, whose descent out of an image into the space remains a miracle, indicated by the title, a phonetic transcription of the German “Was ist das? – What’s this?”

ST PAUL St Gallery director Leonhard Emmerling has co-curated the exhibition with Stephen Bambury, one of New Zealand’s most renowned artists. His long national and international career makes him one of the country’s most distinguished practitioners. His life long examination of Colin McCahon’s work is here extended with the aim of putting it in a hitherto untried context, enlarging the space within which his work and richly deserved legacy is read.