Billy Apple at the Govett-Brewster Art Galley

The Govett-BresterArt Gallery's exhibition Yuichiro Tamura: Milky Mountain includes work by Billy Apple from his Alterations, reflecting Tamura's interest in the contexts within which his work is exhibited. Read more...

Billy Apple's altered staircase at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

Curated by Wystan Curnow, the exhibition Billy Apple: Further Alterations runs at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery to 11 February 2018. Read more...

Jim Speers In Play at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

Jim Speers' Crystal Spirit is showing in the exhibition In Play at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.  Read more...
Image: Crystal Spirit installed at Starkwhite (2009)

Rebecca Baumann: Once more with feeling at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre

Rebecca Baumann's Once more with feeling in Set in Motion. an exhibition exploring light, sound and motion through the work of Len Lye and four contemporary artists. Read more...
Image: installation view of Rebecca Baumann's, Once more with feeling (2014)

Matt Henry: Long Division

Matt Henry's Long Division opens today at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre and runs to 27 November. Read more...
Image: installation view of Matt Henry's Long Division

Matt Henry's Long Division at the GBAG

In his exhibition Long Division, Matt Henry responds to the architecture of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (27 August - 27 November 2016). Read more...
Image: Matt Henry, installation detail, Vernacular Painting, Starkwhite 2011

Rebecca Baumann, Set in Motion, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

Rebecca Baumann is represented in the Set in Motion at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, an exhibition exploring light, sound and motion through the work of Len Lye and four contemporary artists. Read more...
Image: Rebecca Baumann, Once more with feeling (2014)

The art of cameraless photography

An installation view of Gavin Hipkins photograph The Coil in Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Curated by Geoffrey Batchen, the show runs to 14 August 2016.

Gavin Hipkins, The Coil 1998. 32 silver gelatin pints each 510 x 400 mm

The art of the cameraless photograph

Gavin Hipkins is represented in Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brester Art Gallery. Curated by Geoffrey Batchen, the exhibition explores the cameraless mode of photography from its inception in the 1820s through to contemporary practice by artists like Hipkins. The show runs from 29 April to 14 August 2016.
Gavin Hipkins, The Coil 1998. 32 silver gelatin pints each 510 x 400 mm

Len Lye Centre: a building inspired by the movement of light

The new Len Lye Centre will open in new Plymouth on 25 July alongside the refurbished Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. The complex will combine a museum of contemporary art with New Zealand's first institution dedicated to a single artist, the pioneer filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye. Designed by Patterson Associates, the new Centre features a mirror-finished, light-reflecting facade inspired by the movement of light in Lye's sculptures and films - a pitch-perfect research and exhibition centre for an artist who once said: "My work I think is going to be pretty good for the 21st century."
Image: Len  Lye Centre designed by Patterson Associates, Auckland

Simon Rees returns to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

Simon Rees returns to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2014 - this time as director (he was a curator at the gallery during Greg Burke's directorship). Currently Head of Curatorial Development at MAK, the Austrian Museum of Applied Art, Rees brings a wealth of international experience to the position. In 2007 he curated the award winning Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale with artists Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas and in 2011 he was the lead curator for the 15th Tallinn Triennial: FOR LOVE NOT MONEY. He is also a regular contributor to frieze and frieze d/e.

From New Plymouth's coastal walkway to ART HK

Yin Xiuzhen's Black Hole is one of the ten pieces selected by Yuko Hasegawa and located throughout ART HK. The piece was first exhibited on New Plymouth's waterfront walkway as an extension to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery exhibition China in Four Seasons: Song Dong + Yin Xiuzhen in 2010. Image: Yin Xiuzhen, Black Hole (2010), installed at New Plymouth's waterfront walkway with Len Lye's Wind Wand in the background; and installed at ART HK 2010

Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye

The exhibition Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye presents the work of five contemporary artists, including Phil Dadson and Dane Mitchell, engaging with Lye's legacy and the role of language in his work. The exhibition opens tonight at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and runs to 26 February 2012.

Images: Phil Dadson, Osmosis (of Len's Universe), 2011, single channel video (still grab) and Dane Mitchell, Len Lye, 'Snow Birds' 2010, glass, spoken word

Vincent Ward takes time out from filmmaking to stage an exhibition at the GBAG

Filmmaker Vincent Ward is taking time out from Hollywood to stage an exhibition at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. He says his films have been a starting point for fresh exploration in the new mixed media work featuring in the exhibition. "Somewhere between the world of motion, film and painting I am currently working to find an alchemical marriage between these different media".

The exhibition coincides with the publication of a new book Making the Transformational Moment in Film - Unleashing the Power of the Image (with the films of Vincent Ward) by Dan Fleming and distributed worldwide by US publisher Michael Wiese Books.

Breath - The Fleeting Intensity of Life opens tomorrow night at the GBAG and runs to 26 February 2012.

Image: Vincent Ward, Embryo 2011

Review of Dane Mitchell's Radiant Matter Part 1 at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

"I suspect this is the best show of Mitchell's career so far. It is particularly cohesive conceptually, with its methodical ruminations on art viewing processes, 'radiant' but invisible matter and how we might detect it, and the authoritative power of language". Read more...

Image: Dane Mitchell, Radiant Matter Part 1, installation view, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2011. Photograph by Bryan James

Dane Mitchell at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

David Watson: Parade experimental music and multi-media performance

New York-based composer and performer David Watson premieres a multi-media performance piece, Parade, at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery tomorrow night. Inspired in part by Allan Thomas' ethnomusicological study of Hawera in 1946, Watson's new work is a meditation on New York's traditional street parades. 

Yin Xiuzhen's Black Hole on New Plymouth's foreshore

Yin Xiuzhen's Black Hole has been installed alongside New Plymouth's waterfront walkway as an extension to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's current exhibition China in Four Seasons: Song Dong + Yin Xiuzhen, which runs to 12 September 2010.  

Known for her interest in forms of globalisation (and its movements) the artist has converted a worn shipping container - heavily relied upon in the port town of New Plymouth as a mode of transport - into a round signature-cut diamond and positioned the sculpture in the local environment, adjacent to Len Lye's Wind Wand. Emanating light from within, the work is conceptually grounded in ideas about light, purity, progress, trade and desire. 

Image: Yin Xiuzhen, Black Hole (2010), installed at New Plymouth's waterfront walkway with Len Lye's Wind Wand in the background

Large-scale art projects

The Tate Britain has unveiled its new Duveens Commission, Harrier and Jaguar, by Fiona Banner. Banner's largest work to date, Harrier and Jaguar brings the highly charged physicality of two real fighter jets, both previously in active military service, into the unexpected setting of the neoclassical Duveen Galleries.

Opportunities for artists to undertake ambitious projects like Harrier and Jaguar are harder to come by in New Zealand. Public art galleries occasionally commission large-scale art projects - Peter Robinson's Snow Ball Blind Time (2008) that occupied the entire 574 square meters of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery springs to mind. Scale will also be a feature of some of the works being commissioned for Auckland's waterfront under the City Council's public art programme, notably with Anthony McCall's work in a huge silo at the Tank Farm. But it's hard to beat Alan Gibbs' sculpture park at The Farm on the Kaipara where artists like Anish Kapoor and Richard Serra have been able to work on a monumental scale creating spectacular, site-specific sculptures. 

Image: Fiona Banner, Harrier and Jaguar, 2010, Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain

China in Four Seasons: final installment

The final installment of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's year-long investigation of contemporary art from China sees Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen present installations of sculpture and video works that respond to the rapid rate of social change and urbanisation currently talking place in China and their impacts on family and social life.

Curated by Rhana Devenport, the exhibition unfolds in two parts: the first comprising existing works (on display to 12 September 2010), while the second part - from 21 August - will consist of new commissions produced through a residency in New Plymouth. Song Dong will collaborate with the couple's eight-year old daughter Song ErRui, while Yin Xiuzhen will work outside the gallery engaging with the street, urban development and the textures of daily life.

Image: Yin Xiuzhen, Weapons, 2007 (detail), from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery website and courtesy of the artist and Beijing Commune.