Free Four Faces Events Starting This Weekend

Giving Voice To Art....

Visitors wanting to delve deeper into the artworks currently on show at the City Gallery can enjoy free public events from this weekend until October. Highlights include a walking tour of 'Rita Angus's Thorndon', a floor talk by Erika Parkinson (the subject of Peter Peryer's suite of portraits), and music and poetry performances relating to featured artists.

The events get underway on Saturday with an illustrated talk by photographer Gavin Hipkins, and a personal tour of the Michael Illingworth exhibition by art commentator Hamish Keith. Also running are free Gallery tours every Saturday and Sunday from 3pm.

The public events explore aspects of the Four Faces of New Zealand Art exhibition series, which features two major surveys: Rita Angus - 'live to paint and paint to live', and A Tourist in Paradise Lost - The Art of Michael Illingworth, and photography exhibitions by Gavin Hipkins and Peter Peryer.

* Saturday 14 July, 2pm: 'HOMECOMING'' - Gavin Hipkins Leading New Zealand photographic artist Gavin Hipkins gives an illustrated lecture discussing issues raised by his exhibition The Homely. Hipkins will also discuss The Homely in relation to The Next Cabin (2000-2001), a project he is currently developing on the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada. Like The Homely, says Hipkins, it engages with the construction of cultural identities via landscape and the mass media, and defines the packaging of nature for recreation and tourism in a country, like New Zealand, coming to terms with its post-colonial identity.

* Sunday 15 July, 2pm: 'IILLINGWORTH AND THE AUCKLAND ART SCENE' - Hamish Keith Distinguished art writer and commentator Hamish Keith presents a personal tour of the Michael Illingworth exhibition, illuminating the artist's pivotal place in the burgeoning Auckland art scene of the 1960s. 'Earning a living as a full time painter is rapidly becoming possible,' wrote Keith in 1965. 'It is still an enormous struggle, but painters like Michael Illingworth... are proving that it can be done.'

Details of public events can be found in the Open City brochure at Arts Stands around town; and on the Gallery website: www.city-gallery.org.nz.

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