Marty Vreede exhibition opens in Wellington

News Release

Thursday 2 September

Marty Vreede exhibition opens in Wellington

New work by senior Fine Arts lecturer Marty Vreede will be on show at the Solander Gallery in Wellington from next Wednesday.
Marty is exhibiting with Wellington based multi-media visual artist Sheyne Tuffery.

The Wellington exhibition follows Marty’s recent success in the Ako Aotearoa Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards. Not only did he receive an Excellence Award, but he also won the prestigious Prime Minister’s Supreme Excellence Award 2010.

Marty is an accomplished artist in his own right, as well as a teacher.
He founded the Print Workshop at the Quay School of the Arts in Whanganui 20 years ago, and developed it as a central hub for printmaking in New Zealand. Last year he received a Fulbright award which allowed him to visit the legendary Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts in Pendleton, Oregon.

He has also studied papermaking and printmaking in the United Kingdom, as a Nuffield Foundation Scholar. In 2007 he was the first Artist in Residence at the University of Hawaii Print Workshop (Manoa), and has been invited back for another residency.

Over the last four years Marty has participated in more than thirty shows in New Zealand and overseas.

He says the new series of work exhibited at Solander Gallery has come from a desire to “get closer to drawing”. Working with stone lithography at Crow’s Shadow last year brought Marty back to the immediacy and intimacy of drawing.

“These new etchings started their life as charcoal drawings on glass and were then transferred to a zinc plate through a polymer film process. Then the traditional layering of Hard Ground and Aquatint takes the image into a pure state of direct drawing,” he says.

This process has allowed Mary to work up in scale, with the largest etchings just over 700mm x 500mm.

The images come from a series of drawings of functional objects held in the Whanganui Museum which attracted the artist because of their craftsmanship and their inherent aesthetic beauty. Marty sees them as symbols of promise and of a future, looking forward rather than something from the past. “Reworking and looking anew at these beautiful objects allows us to create an alternative contemporary narrative for the intent of the object.”
The opening of his new exhibition, titled Implement of Change, will be held at the Solander Gallery in Willis Street, Wellington at 5.30 pm on Wednesday 8 September. He exhibition will run until 2 October.

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