Friday, February 28, 2014

Five artists withdraw from the Biennale of Sydney


Five artists have withdrawn from the Biennale of Sydney over links between Transfield Holdings (founding patron and sponsor of the Biennale) and Australia's offshore detention centres for asylum seekers. You can read their Statement of Withdrawal to the Biennale at Leg of Lamb.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Biennale responds to concerns over links between sponsor and detention centres for asylum seekers


A few weeks before the Biennale of Sydney opens, 35 artists (of the 90 taking part) wrote to the board expressing their concerns over primary sponsor Transfield Holdings link to offshore detention facilities for asylum seekers. This left the Biennale with an unenviable choice: to bow to pressure from the artists and sever links with Transfield and the Belgiorno-Nettis family (the owners of the company), or remain loyal to the company, recognising its role as founding partner and longtime supporter of the Biennale.

The board has issued a statement saying: "The Biennale's ability to effectively contribute to the cessation of bi-partisan government policy is far from black-and-white. The only certainty is that without our Founding Partner, the Biennale will no longer exist. Consequently, we unanimously believe  that our loyalty to the Belgiorno-Nettis family - and the hundreds of thousands of people who benefit from the Biennale - must override claims over which there is ambiguity".

With just days to go before the Biennale is launched, the art world will be watching to see how the artists respond.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Lovers at Starkwhite


Lovers continues at Starkwhite this week, through to 6 March. You can read a review of the show here.
Image: installation view of Lovers, curated by Martin Basher

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Starkwhite at Art Basel Hong Kong


Starkwhite and the Walters Estate will present an exhibition of works by pioneer abstract artist Gordon Walters at this year's edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.

Walters is a revered figure in New Zealand, recognised for a long and productive career spanning four decades. The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki presented a retrospective exhibition his work in 1983 and a survey exhibition Parallel Lines in 1994, and he has been included in many survey shows, including A Very Peculiar Practice: Aspects of Recent New Zealand Art at the City Gallery, Wellington (1995). His place in New Zealand's art history is also memorialised in the bi-annual Walters Prize exhibition and award at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.

However, aside from Australia where his work has been seen in Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand art at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art (1992) and the 5th Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (2006-2007), Walters' work has not found its way onto an international stage. This provides an opportunity for Starkwhite and the Walters Estate to stage a solo show of his work at one of the world's great art fairs where it will be seen by international curators, exhibition makers and influential collectors.

The Gallery will also present a new work by Perth-based artist Rebecca Baumann commissioned for the Encounters section of Art Basel Hong Kong, which has been curated by Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator at Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art. Baumann's Automated Colour Field (Variation V) consists of 132 split-panel flip clocks, each with the number cards replaced with cards of solid colour, creating a vast and constantly changing field of colour.

Starkwhite first presented Baumann's work in the exhibition Bazinga! curated by Robert Leonard and staged in 2013 as a joint venture with Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art, and again later in the year at the Auckland Art Fair and inaugural edition of Sydney Contemporary.
Images: Gordon Walters, Arahura, screenprint (1982), 760 x 565mm (top); Rebecca Baumann, Automated Colour Field (Variation V), 2014 (detail), 132 flip-clocks, laser-cut paper, batteries, 1550 x 3950 x 90mm (bottom)

Friday, February 14, 2014

A gallery-centred view of the art world


"What artist wants to show with a gallery that can't offer them shows?" says Marc Spiegler, the director of Art Basel. "We stand for a gallery-centred vision of the art world." Spiegler is quoted in Blake Gopnik's article, Great art needs an audience, on why those who believe galleries are no longer necessary are wrong. Read more...
Image: detail of David Scanavino's Changes (2104), 270 x 700cm, VCT tiles and change, installed in LOVERS, a group show curated by artist Martin Basher for Starkwhite 

Thursday, February 13, 2014

A shift in focus from Basel to Hong Kong?


Overthenet has picked up on news that there are no New Zealand (or Australian) galleries in the lineup for this year's Art Basel (Switzerland). In the past, Michael Lett (two presentations at Art Statements) and Starkwhite (one presentation at Art Statements and another at Art Unlimited) have flown the New Zealand flag in Basel. Now Art Basel Hong Kong appears to be the preferred fair for many New Zealand and Australian galleries. Starkwhite has been showing at Art HK and Art Basel Hong Kong since 2008 and will participate again this year in Hong Kong's international art fair, along with Michael Lett and Hopkinson Mossman, and Australian galleries Jensen|Sydney, Roslyn Oxley9, Anna Schwartz, Tolarno and Utopian Slumps.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Summer Lovers at Starkwhite


Starkwhite's 2014 season begins with Lovers, a late-summer group show organized by gallery artist Martin Basher.

Picking up on the semantic slippage of the show's title, Lovers is a paean to beauty for the romantic viewer and illicit assignation with visual pleasure for the serious conceptualist. Featuring work by eleven of Basher's New Zealand and American contemporaries along with Basher himself, Lovers hones in on the physical and tactile elements of the work by this varied and inter-generational group, finding material and conceptual affinities connecting work otherwise separated by geography, time and conceptual focus. Lovers is a show with the tenor of sunsets, long cocktails, and holidays drawing to a close, and in this atmosphere, the works in the show find intimate common ground in the visceral and sensate, their relationships immediate and intense; summer lovers for a month.

Lovers includes works by Kevin Appel (US), Martin Basher (NZ/US), Whitney Bedford (US), Tamar Halpern (US), Amy Howden-Chapman (NZ/US), Kate Newby (NZ/US), Peter Nicholls (NZ), Brie Ruais (US), Layla Rudneva-Mackay (NZ), David Scanavino (US) and Gordon Walters (NZ).

The exhibition runs to 6 March 2014.
Image: Whitney Bedford, Love Note.1, mixed media on canvas, 10.5 x 14 in., 2014. Photo Evan Bedford