Mark Amery

Mark Amery reviews a show that rocks between art and music at the Adam Art Gallery.

Mark Amery on a Pacific exhibition at Te Papa that rewrites the history of abstraction.

As Solander Works on Paper Gallery shows in abundance, there's an array of artists practising principally on paper nationally. An appraisal through survey exhibition or publication of these artists, who often go under the art world radar, is overdue.

Staging a revenge fantasy in what looked like a post-apocalyptic landscape of building rubble (ironically next to a Paint and Panel shop), James R Ford described this automobile attack as a ‘collaborative sculpture’, even noting on the television news the ubiquity of metal as a sculptural material.

Mark Amery looks at a new dealer and new artists in Wellington. "Just when I’d started to despair about not seeing spreads of fresh artwork from New Zealand’s up and comers in Wellington, this year has felt like something of a circuit breaker."

New York artist Gregory Sholette is currently in Wellington on a residency at Enjoy Gallery. Through the work he’s been making with local artists, open discussions, and a public seminar this weekend on collaborative art practice, he’s providing context and inspiration for artists here, says Mark Amery.

Mark Amery looks at humour in contemporary art through some recent exhibits.

Mark Amery visits Community Garden at City Gallery Wellington where "four artists present examples of art that demonstrate their direct engagement with the world outside their studios."

Dealer galleries tend to take two different approaches to introducing new artists to their stables of represented artists.

Mark Amery reviews exhibitions by emerging contemporary Maori artists showing in Wellington, including Leilani Kake’s moving three-part documentary video work Tino Rangatira Tanga.

Mark Amery reviews portraiture from the Adam Portrait Award show and beyond. 

Mark Amery says the visual arts programme of the NZ International Arts Festival has been a modest one.

Mark Amery says restaging New Zealand's contribution to the Venice Biennale back home is 'akin to putting ships in bottles. '

Degas did ballet dancers, Frances Hodgkins farming implements, but I can't think of any artist who has more monopolized one single subject matter than Michael Hight.  That subject has been beehives.

Julian Dashper’s work asks all sorts of great questions about art history, the hierarchy of different media and their relation to how we live with art in our daily lives.

TheNewDowse: It’s inspiring to enter an art museum full of adults and children engaging with bright, adventurous art and design that feels very much of its cultural moment. 

2009 was the year we got to see what Wellington looks like without City Gallery, which emphasised the impressive array of visual arts activity happening beyond it.

For over ten years Photospace in Courtenay Place has been providing a home for photographers.

If just as likely to be labeled borderline psychotic as psychic, artists have nevertheless often been seen as able to unlock the doors of perception to the unknown, the unseen and the inexplicable.

This month there’s an impressive array of contemporary Maori art practice on display in the Wellington region.