Chris Wilkie "Dark to Light" @ Hangar

Exhibition of works by Chris Wilkie

Following the success of Chris T Wilkie’s exhibition “From Deep” in the summer of 2008. the artist returns with a large selection of his oil paintings, to the intimate space of Hangar Gallery and Frames, Kamo.

In 2009 Wilkie’s paintings focused on his new home in the South, and some of the environmental issues there. In dream like settings of Lake Orbell, te wai o Pani, the refuge of the rare Takahe bird, the artist described a nearly- lost world.  But in these works, Wilkie begins with dark imagery begun in the Bay of Islands in 2004, stimulated by a battle between Maori and French. In stark contrast to this, the artist finishes with new Fiordland pieces full of hope and light, and a tenderness expressed towards our whole country. They truly travel from dark to light.

Sometimes these new pictures are specifically of Fiordland and her endangered species, which are often referred to in drifting feathers against primordial landscapes. But Wilkie has also been touched by the loss of delicate human lives too, and mentions Maori relatives who have passed since his southern sojourn, alongside tiny tragic Lily Bing and the Kahui twins, all of whom the artist parallels with fledgling birds. But in the end the artist evokes them all to “fly away with Aisling”, giving resurrection to frail souls, whose fates have deeply touched so many.

So in many of Wilkie’s later works, there is a sense of hope. The huge “Sanctuary” features a Kokako, a bird extinct in the South Island, but now being returned to protected islands, and there is a survival of a spiritual force and wairua in many landscapes, such as the writhing female form in “Dusky”. 

This is an almost overwhelming show for the tiny Hangar Gallery, and maintains the strong Post Modern thrust of that space in suburban Kamo, Whangarei, begun by Megan and Barry Squires in 2006. The artist is determined to show a rich and powerful journey there, so viewers can expect a rich collection of big and small paintings, rendered with the dreamy, contemplative atmosphere peculiar to the art of this significant New Zealand artist.