Column | Mark Amery: Visual Arts

By Mark Amery

Local knowledge is a charged subject in art currently. Globalisation sees artists on the move, while locally funded institutions bring together the local, national and international in ever-closer exchange and, sometimes, tension. Read More »

By Mark Amery

A good title can only take you so far. Sometimes however that can be quite a way. Particularly when the art backs it up. A great example is Never Mind the Pollocks, a small, smart exhibition currently on at Suite Gallery on Oriental Parade. Read More »

As part of The Big Idea’s celebration of ten years online, we challenged critic Mark Amery to sum up those years in the visual arts - in writing.

To open it up for discussion Mark has also brought together contributions from five leading visual arts practitioners - Judy Millar, Reuben Friend, Peter Madden, Rob Garrett and Lonnie Hutchinson. Read More »

By Mark Amery

I’m in love with a puddle. A puddle in Civic Square that, like any other, gathers an ever-changing mix of rain, grass clippings, sticks and trash. Read More »

By Mark Amery

I last reviewed the Wallace Art Awards, New Zealand’s most established, in 2006. I described the finalists’ exhibition then as a strange mix of “contemporary bric-a-brac.” That, in its efforts to contain the breadth of contemporary New Zealand art within a traditional domestic frame, diversity had become “a byword for mediocrity.” Read More »

A new exhibition by Shane Cotton sees him both looking back and pulling everything apart to start again, says Mark Amery in his latest visual arts column. Read More »

By Mark Amery

The funny thing about Old School New School - a Massey College of Creative Arts exhibition celebrating the 125 years Wellington has had a design school - is how much it reminds me of Te Papa. Funny, because the exhibition is in the great hall of what was once our National Art Gallery, curated by a former director of that gallery Luit Bieringa. Read More »

By Mark Amery

It’s ironic that of two major exhibitions of New Zealand art currently on show in Wellington, Behind Closed Doors at Adam Art Gallery is drawn from private collections and is free, whilst Oceania at City Gallery is drawn largely from public collections and will cost you $10. Read More »

By Mark Amery

I like a good party. I’m all for the celebratory, the joyful, and the comforting. I love things that are well constructed and finely made. Yet when it comes to art, I’m also looking for something more. Read More »

Mark Amery visits New Plymouth for the Festival of Lights and Len Lye: All Souls Carnival.

"A choreographer with light, sound and movement, Lye was one of our greatest artists. He reaches for us beyond just an experience of wonderment." Read More »

Mark Amery marks the passing of one artist, Gordon Crook, and the emergence of another, Liyen Chong

“As soon as you give something a name you’re blocking the way you enter into the essence of whatever it is you’re looking at,” remarks Wellington artist Gordon Crook to Clare O’Leary in the opening of her 2010 documentary A Life of Art about him. Read More »

By Mark Amery

In the past year it feels like there’s been a discernible jump in the number of exhibitions popping up in out of the way, difficult to access or hear about spaces. Read More »

Crystal City at the Dowse Art Museum is full of strong work that encourages the public to engage in unique experiences of their world, or to observe the artist engaging in it on their behalf.

It makes us look at the world anew across cultures and countries, writes Mark Amery in his latest visual arts column. Read More »

By Mark Amery

For a magnificent, vital sculptural object forget the tired, neoclassical war memorial heroics of Weta Sculpture’s Rugby World Cup bronze - due to rupture the grassy banks of Ilott Green anytime now. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Where once people got their fix of awe and wonder from a majestic landscape painting, today they are more likely to get it near the end of a blockbuster movie - from a huge explosion as their hero narrowly escapes a predicament. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Collecting Contemporary is elegant, well meaning but dull. Why, you may well ask. Surely this is some of the best of the best? A selection of Te Papa’s additions to the national contemporary art collection since 2006. Read More »

By Mark Amery

In sculptor Joanna Langford’s work the real and imaginary together twist and swirl upwards. Up into our shared dream space, from our place rooted here on the ground. Her large temporary installations highlight dynamically the power of the individual imagination to enact change.
Read More »

By Mark Amery

Love is complicated; art is complex. This could be the subtitle for this fascinating exhibition. Complex, because with an array of art and artefacts contemporary and historical, from New Zealand and abroad, Tender is the Night teases out art’s ability to get under the skin of the platitudes we hear in popular culture about love. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Art dealers aren’t renowned for their generosity towards each other. In this regard they’re not so different from business people in any industry. Yet whilst they are traditionally territorial creatures, they are also becoming increasingly mobile. More flexible in the way they operate. And that is seeing many working together more. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Often when we craft something we are capturing and containing nature, then transforming it through bringing our own design ideas to it. Nature and culture become entwined. Read More »

By Mark Amery

The late 1960s saw a wave of art begin that explored the gallery experience in different ways, or broke out of the gallery entirely. It was art that moved away from being purely object based - experiential, temporary, conceptual, political and environmental. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Visual art was once dominated by two subject matters: the still life and the nude. Today food and sex are the subject of countless magazines and television programmes, while in contemporary art they are mostly avoided. Read More »

By Mark Amery

There are strange new noises coming from the Academy of Fine Arts on Queens Wharf. Not only is there the banshee like howl of a dynamic Raewyn Turner light, sound and smell work in a dark backroom, shattering the sedate pedestrian air of the galleries, but there are a number of programming moves that suggest something of a shake-up at the Academy is underway. Read More »

By Mark Amery

The expression ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ might at first seem misleading. After all, the culture around us, not the individual, tends to dictate to us what beauty looks like. But what of those who see things differently, based for example on their sexuality or cultural perspective? Read More »

Mark Amery writes about the growth of the Lightbox Project in Courtenay Place, and current artwork ‘All the Cunning Stunts’.

"In a place of passage, the tall, paired boxes gently calibrate your journey, offering views slightly askew to the street. It gives artists lots to work with." Read More »

An exhibition of Australian printmaking highlights a lack of public support for works on paper artists in New Zealand, says Mark Amery in his latest visual arts column. Read More »

There’s no doubt that Brian Brake was New Zealand’s most renowned international photographer, as the Te Papa exhibition publicity announces.

Yet the country that celebrated this was a very different one from today, says Mark Amery. Read More »

By Mark Amery

The relationship between public display and private commerce is pretty explicit when public and dealer gallery both exhibit the same artist at the same time. You like the work? You can buy it over there. Read More »

By Mark Amery

The saddest thing about the much-maligned Parade exhibition that opened Te Papa wasn’t the show itself. Rather, that since Parade (best known for its pairing of a McCahon and a fridge) the museum has seemed increasingly cautious about putting out the national art collection in a lively way at the forefront of its displays to tell stories. Read More »

By Mark Amery

A quick flick through a history of New Zealand painting will throw up one surprising omission – sheep.  It’s as if the landscape has been shorn of signs of its economic base. Read More »