Wellington City Gallery: Festival Season, Feb. '10
MEDIA RELEASE
10 November 2009
City Gallery Wellington announces its Festival Season City Gallery Wellington launches its Festival Season with three exhibitions to excite the senses. Sound, colour and form are all celebrated in the work of three leading artists during the free Festival Season, which runs February 20 to 16 May 2010.
New Zealand’s first opportunity to experience
a world-renowned sound installation artist, Wellington’s
chance to see a large-scale survey on one of our foremost
figurative painters, and a major showing one of New
Zealand’s most revered abstractionistsare City Gallery
Wellington’s contribution to the New Zealand International
Arts Festival 2010.
Gallery Director Paula Savage is
thrilled to be able to offer such a variety of experiences
to Gallery visitors: “Yayoi Kusama’s Mirrored Years has
engaged a remarkably wide audience, from traditional gallery
visitors to those who have never been inside a gallery
before. Our Festival Season exhibitions provide such a mix
of artforms –from music to intense colour to delicate form
and line –that we are sure people will love this season
just as much.
We are also delighted that this season
will be free entry, ensuring many repeat visits to
experience all three exhibitions. ” The Forty-Part Motet
(2001) by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff is an immersive
sculpturally-conceived sound piece, in which forty
separately-recorded voices are played back through forty
speakers. This evocative installation uses recordings of the
Salisbury Cathedral choir singing Spem in Alium Nunquam
Habui (1573) by Thomas Tallis, one of England’smost
influential Renaissance composers. Séraphine Pick’s
original and imaginative paintings have made her one of New
Zealand’s most highly regarded painters.
From the
spectral dresses, leaky baths and teetering suitcases of the
1990s to the psychologically-charged dreamscapes of more
recent years, this large-scale survey, curated by Felicity
Milburn of Christchurch Art Gallery, will bring together
over seventy works made between 1994 and 2009 by this
Wellington-based artist. “You want a landscape? Take a
drive in the country.”Milan Mrkusich’s blunt piece of
advice to Woman’s Weekly readers in 1969 was made in the
face of intense hostility towards abstract art. Forty years
later, the exhibition Trans–form brings Mrkusich’s now
highly revered abstract painting to City Gallery
Wellington.
Curated by Alan Wright and Ed Hanfling,
this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to witness
Mrkusich’s potent use of symbolic form, line and colour
over four decades of painting. A strong programme of public
events will support the exhibitions, providing visitors with
a deeper understanding of the works on show. Séraphine
Pick: Tell Me More is a Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o
Waiwhetu touring exhibition.
Touring sponsor Ernst &
Young. Trans-form: The Abstract Art of Milan Mrkusich is a
Gus Fisher Gallery exhibition, in partnership with City
Gallery Wellington.
The Festival Season: Janet
Cardiff, Milan Mrkusich, Seraphine Pick
20 February
–16 May 2010 Free Entry
City Gallery Wellington Civic
Square, Wellington
citygallery@wmt.org.nz
www.citygallery.org.nz
City Gallery Wellington
is managed by the Wellington Museums Trust with major
funding support from Wellington City Council. Festival
Season Principal
Sponsor:
ENDS