10 exhibitions to see in April
In April, Warren Feeney’s list includes a scent and sound exhibition inviting visitors’ participation, an exhibition that centres its attention on 110 chairs, and a group exhibition with important questions about the nature of love.
1. Karl Maughan: New Paintings
The Central Art Gallery, The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, 2 Worcester Blvd, April 12-May 12
Over three decades Karl Maughan’s flower gardens have perpetually blossomed, drawing gallery visitors into a colourful sensory experience, Maughan’s painterly colourful flowers and foliage evidence of a human presence that remains pleasantly absent. His hard-edged colourful light is forever present, welcoming us into a relationship with nature, as rational and ordered as it is sublime.
2. Jo Burzynska: Scents Take Up the Ringing
Ashburton Art Gallery, 327 West St, until April 21
Multimedia artist Dr Jo Burzynska’s arts practice began with her working in sound, and she is now developing numerous series of works in various media that she describes collectively as “crossmodal art”. Scents Take up the Ringing sees multisensory bells ringing out, inviting visitors to experience scent, sound and Burzynska’s command of the gallery’s space.
3. Siobhan O'Brien: Form and Emptiness
Art Hole, 336 St Asaph St, April 23-27
Siobhan O’Brien describes the idea of “form and emptiness” as ways of understanding the nature of ourselves, acknowledging the influence of Buddhist practices and concepts. Representative of work developed over the past two years, the subjects of her paintings “emerging out of and dissolving into space, as everything comes into existence, reaches fruition and dissipates”.
4. The Chair: A Story of Design and Making in Aotearoa – Presented by ECC
Objectspace, 65 Cambridge Tce, April 6-May 19
Toured by Auckland’s Objectspace to its gallery in Christchurch, The Chair brings together 110 chairs representing, but not defining, a history of 170 years of design and making in Aotearoa. The Chair’s reach is wide, its reality as a subject making this exhibition an inspired and userfriendly, accessible encounter.
5. Nō hea tōku reo? To whom does this Language belong?
Te Whare Tapere, The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, 2 Worcester Blvd, until April 7
A group exhibition that responds to the question, if love is a language, how is it communicated? Nō hea tōku reo/To whom does this language belong? is an unanticipated and beautiful encounter, eight artists forming a conversation about love as a language that evocatively connects, opening up many questions, encompassing how is love communicated and who do we share this language with?
6. Group Exhibition: The Return Of Hope And Grace
Stoddart Cottage, 2 Waipapa Ave, Diamond Harbour, until April 30
Curated by Dunedin-based Scott Flanagan, his 10 chosen artists for The Return Of Hope and Grace are also Otago based, sharing in Flanagan’s love of reading poetry, maintaining that ambiguity and poetry will prevail. The artists are: Sandra Bianciardi, Kirsten Ferguson, Eliza Glyn, Nicola Hansby, Anet Neutze, Ann Sagan, Amanda Shanley, Anya Sinclair, Sharon Singer and Rachel Taylor.
7. Michael Armstrong: Confronting Global Disasters
McAtamney Gallery and Design Store, 40 Talbot St, Geraldine, April 2-30
Painter/sculptor Michael Armstrong’s subjects frequently inspire and confront, sustained by an orchestration of intuitive gestures, line and colour. Of central interest, particularly over the past decade, has been his engagement with a series of wry and ironic apocalyptic themes, rich in their associations between life and art.
8. Olivia Chamberlain and Sam Towse: The streets are paved with water
COCA Toi Moroki, 66 Gloucester St, April 12-May 12
Christchurch/Ōtautahi artists Olivia Chamberlain and Sam Towse are undertaking an inquiry and consideration of the central city, its surfaces, objects and items, extrapolating and recontextualising found materials and forms, creating structured paintings on canvas that may also extend to gallery walls and “wallmounted concrete-based works”, discovering something of the nature of the city’s enigmatic materiality.
9. Bringing Art into the Lives of Everyone: Celebrating 50 years of Art History
Ilam Campus Gallery, Fine Arts Lane, off Clyde Rd, until April 18
Established by Professor John Simpson, head of the Canterbury School of Fine Arts 1961-1990, its art history department celebrates its 50th year and responsibilities in raising the visibility of Aotearoa’s artists in publications that include Julie King’s Flowers into Landscape: Margaret Stoddart 1865-1934 and Karen Stevenson’s The Frangipani is Dead.
10. Brenda Nightingale with Lisa Walker and Karl Fritz
Jonathan Smart Gallery, 52 Buchan St, Sydenham, April 12–May 4
In April, artist Brenda Nightingale is occupying gallery space with Purau artists-in-residence and jewellers Karl Fritsch and Lisa Walker, all three sharing a sensibility through their practices about beauty and unease. Nightingale’s paintings often unsettle, the worlds her figures inhabit indeterminate spaces and situations, as nostalgic as they are anxious.