OPENING EVENT: Wednesday 28 August 2024

A Winter group presentation of new work by Emma Fitts, Gavin Hurley and Martin Poppelwell.

Emma Fitts’ practice spans painting, photography and sculpture. New work in this exhibition explores various techniques of saturation, scribbling and splashing of paint, in conversation with rope, cellophane, mesh and chrome rods.  Recurrent themes in her works include queer art histories, Modernist textiles and architectures, and the idea of biography, with a particular emphasis on emotion and affect. 

Fitts studied at the University of Canterbury, Ōtautahi, and completed an MFA at Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.  She has work in private and public collections throughout Aotearoa including The Christchurch Art Gallery, The Dowse Art Museum, Canterbury University and Chartwell Trust collection at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. 

Gavin Hurley presents new work continuing his exploration of portraiture. His playful identikit approach of composite characters are presented with birds derived from Fernand Legēr’s parrots perched precariously on the shoulders of his figures.  Next to these are anti-portraits – floral interruptions - that almost completely obscure the faces of his figures.  “I started obscuring faces recently after looking at American artist Ben Shahn’s 1960s  “The Blind Botanist” series where the faces are covered with thorns which crept up with age.  The flowers in my works are derived from a paint-by-numbers kit as well as Louise Henderson’s work “Paper Flower Seller” (1957) – all of which continue the theme of growing up that spans my practice”

Hurley studied at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland and has been exhibiting in New Zealand and Australia since 1999.  He has works in private and public collections including the Christchurch Art Gallery, The Suter Gallery, Wellington City Council, the Alexander Turnball Library and the Arts House Trust.  

Hawkes Bay based Martin Poppelwell also studied at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland and has exhibited throughout Australasia since the early nineties.  His work is held in private and public collections including Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, MTG Napier and the Arts House Trust.

Poppelwell says of his work in the show - “...with multiple scales, i am kind of building small 'gangs/packs/set', thus creating networks and 'chatter' amongst the pieces. i suppose this is why i make work at varying scales, much like a cityscape, tiny, small, medium, large and ridiculous.! in these works and studies are evidence that i am constantly thinking , well sort of , about how the 3&4 dimensional diagram, that i use as the basis of all the drawing and painting that i do. you know full well that i have referred to samuel beckett's writings, in particular his first 4 'novellas', (Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies and the Unnameable), as i believe that in these works he invented a version of narrative space that could inform a kind of temporal, cartesian and narrative component in my work. hence the long titles which are quotes from these texts. For me they suspend a kind of dysfunctional 'character' in space, much like the theatre that he developed after these texts and ongoing until his death. and perhaps this dysfunctional character i identify as an artist, bumbling, failing, falling, and going onward...”

Image: Gavin Hurley, 2024