Last chance to see magnificent Hammond exhibition

Hokey Pokey 1998
acrylic on canvas
Private collection, Auckland

Press Release: For immediate release, 29 January 2008.

Very last chance to see magnificent Hammond exhibition

Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning, the much talked about exhibition of paintings by Bill Hammond, finishes at City Gallery Wellington on Sunday, 10 February. Over 50,000 people have already flocked to the Gallery and been inspired by Hammond’s opulent works.

“If there was ever a reason for spending a weekend in Wellington this summer, Jingle Jangle Morning is it” Keith Stewart in the Sunday Star Times, 25 November.

City Gallery Wellington is not only the only North Island venue for this highly lauded exhibition, but probably its last. There are currently no plans to further tour the show, with works soon being returned to the many collectors, here and overseas, who have generously lent their highly-valued paintings.

Bill Hammond, renowned for his sense of wit and irony, occupies a unique place in New Zealand art history, with a language and technique that is wholly his own. A practicing musician himself, Jingle Jangle Morning is centered on the theme of music in Hammond’s work; the title comes from the Bob Dylan song Hey Mr Tambourine Man but is also the name of one of his paintings. Music has been a constant in Hammond’s career and he speaks of his paintings as being like instrumentals “laid out flat”.

“This is a steroid-packed visual rock’n’ roll… Music plays loud, the heavens radiate light…”, Mark Amery in the Dominion Post , 16 January.

While Hammond is perhaps the only New Zealand painter to have named so many of his works after songs, he may also be the only one to have so strongly claimed one motif – birds. He became hooked on them after a trip to the Auckland Islands with fellow artists in 1989. The Buller series, in which Hammond holds a mirror up to NZ post colonial society, was inspired by the shady Victorian ornithologist Sir Walter Lawry Buller. Believing that New Zealand’s indigenous people, flora and fauna were destined to die out; Buller traded thousands of native birds, some of them, like the huia, into extinction.

Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning
Until 10 February 2008
City Gallery Wellington
Civic Square, Wellington
www.citygallery.org.nz
Admission: FREE

For further information or images please contact:
Rachel Healy, Publicist/ Communications Co-ordinator
T: 04 801 3959, 027 687 4226 ,
E: rachel.healy@wmt.org.nz

Bill Hammond: Jingle, Jangle Morning is a Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu touring exhibition with the support of Ernst & Young, Creative New Zealand and the Friends of the Christchurch Art Gallery. City Gallery Wellington is managed by the Wellington Museums Trust with major funding support from Wellington City Council.

ENDS

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