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17/1/2010

Gavin Hipkins

Adam Art Gallery, Wellington

Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past is a suite of five discrete projects, each with their own approach to the re-visioning of historical material.

Replacing The Labours of Herakles, the touring exhibition of lithographs and etchings by Marian Maguire, is a group show of recent acquisitions from Victoria University of Wellington’s Art Collection. Featuring work by Vivian Lynn, Hye Rim Lee, Gavin Hurley, Daniel Malone, Billy Apple and Mary-Louise Browne, this diverse group show provides a snapshot of the current collecting activities of the University.

Alongside this, the Adam Art Gallery is proud to be hosting seven precious Attic vases, illustrating scenes from the life of Herakles and selected from various collections by Victoria University’s 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 from 1859 to 1933, held in the university’s library. This curatorial project is the first to address the journal’s key role in the survival, revival and dissemination of European printmaking.

The fourth exhibition presents Bible Studies (New Testament) a major new body of work by leading New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins that brings literary and religious sources into play to produce a rich commentary on the lasting power of iconography as its shapes us personally and collectively.

The series takes as its starting point a children's illustrated bible published in 1968 (the year of the artist's birth) and re-issues 14 of its plates as large-scale, reverse-printed photographs that take us on an episodic journey—made strange by means of negative registration and lurid colouring—through incidents in the life of Christ. Over these de-familiarised scenes the artist has laid embroidered patches that reproduce short phrases drawn from another widely known source: Goethe's Faust, to create disjunctive pairings of word and image.

Hipkins states, "I was raised in suburban Auckland in the 1970s by a Catholic mother and atheist father. This enduring tension, and at times outright conflict, is one of the key touchstones for Bible Studies."

This series demonstrates Hipkins' fascination for the power of image making to register the deep effects of cultural imprinting through such procedures as photomontage and the play of depth of field. He uses digital processes to re-trace his sources and draws out random, unexpected but deeply embedded meanings which reference his teenage pop-cultural inheritance: heavy-metal, horror movies and the 'Jesus complex' that haunted his adolescence. Layered and allusively ambiguous, Bible Studies unpicks and repacks Hipkins' cultural baggage.

Finally the Adam Art Gallery pays tribute to New Zealand artist Julian Dashper by presenting two recent acquisitions to the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection which also recall the past in unexpected ways.

The Adam Art Gallery has published two catalogues to accompany the exhibitions. One has been prepared by David Maskill and his students to accompany their selection of prints from the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The other documents Gavin Hipkins’ Bible Studies (New Testament) and features a new essay by leading Australian art historian Rex Butler and an interview with the artist conducted by contemporary art writer Allan Smith.

In 2010, the Adam Art Gallery will be holding a forum to complement Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past. Led by leading academics from Victoria University, this discussion will address the legacy of narrative within visual culture.

In realising these projects the Adam Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa, Photography by Woolf, Victoria University’s School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Exhibition Services, and Coopers Creek.

Further information:
Melanie Oliver Tel: +64 4 4635229 Email: melanie.oliver@vuw.ac.nz

The Adam Art Gallery is the university gallery of Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. It is a forum for critical thinking about art and its histories as well as the professional structure within which the Victoria University Art Collection is managed. The gallery has built a considerable reputation for its programmes that explore the full range of media available to artists and which aim to test and expand art form and disciplinary boundaries. The gallery is a remarkable architectural statement designed by Ian Athfield, one of New Zealand's foremost architects.

Opening of the exhibition by Gavin Hipkins: January 18 h 6pm

Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington
Gate 3, Kelburn Parade
PO Box 600, Wellington 6140
New Zealand
Tuesday – Sunday, 11am - 5pm
Free Entry

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