Return to Timaru for artist

Ross Gray is a Christchurch-based artist, art-educator and heritage advocate whose career spans over five decades.

Then Again is an exhibition of Gray’s work from throughout this expansive career, tracing both the evolutions and the persistent concerns that have given it shape.

The retrospective exhibition also marks a return to Timaru for Gray. Although this is the first local exhibition of his work, he spent a year teaching at Timaru Boys’ High School during the early 1970s, at the start of his professional career as an artist.

Gray was born in Whanganui in 1945. In the mid-60s, he moved to Christchurch to study at the University of Canterbury School of Art under the tuition of Rudolph Gopas (1913-1983). Gopas was renowned for his passionate teaching on the styles and philosophies of international Modernism and for inspiring generations of young Neoexpressionist painters in Christchurch, including Gray. Neo-expressionism refers to the revival of expressionist methods, styles and ideas in the latter half of the twentieth century. Like Expressionism, Neoexpressionism often sought to express the inner world of the artist and explore the physical characteristics of paint.

Gray’s exploration of these ideas is most evident in the paintings he produced while living in Timaru. Merge (pictured), for example, is a work from 1971 comprising fields of bold colours that seem to be both melting together and separating, like curdled milk. The work teeters between abstraction and figuration, with the layers of paint suggesting the skeleton of a landscape or even a domestic interior.

In Merge, Gray balances the brute force of colour with careful and strategic application techniques. This is a key pillar of his creative practice through which he has found form for many themes, such as cultural heritage, time, memory and community, and through which he has found an admiring audience.

Merge will be on display at the Aigantighe Art Gallery as part of Then Again until April 26.