Two New Painting Shows for the New Year

Two New Painting Shows for the New Year

ROBINSON AND ARMSTRONG IN ASHBURTON

The Ashburton Art Gallery is excited to be opening two new exhibitions on Sunday 29th of January at 2pm. Both solo exhibitions pay tribute to the medium of painting and its enduring power as an artistic discipline. Opening in the Colin Redmond Gallery will be Strange Attractor an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Dunedin based artist James Robinson. The artist’s visual diary will also accompany this exhibition which contains additional drawings which inform the completed works.

Robinson is regarded as a significant artist of his generation known for his honest and immediate approach. Critic Warwick Brown describes his attitude to making art “like a tide Robinson is a force of nature, and, like nature, his art is capable of sublimity and terror, of tranquillity and turbulence. Just as the retreating tide arranges jetsam on the sand at random, but with a sense of the abstract power that placed it there, so Robinson’s art confronts us with a record of swirling activity.”

Robinson was the Paramount Winner of the Wallace Art Awards in 2007, and has held numerous prestigious residencies at the Sarjeant (Wanganui), the McCahon Trust (Auckland) as well as the William Hodges in Southland and others in New York and Berlin. In August 2014 he was awarded a year-long residency near Melbourne, Australia.

Also opening on Sunday is an exhibition of recent works by South Canterbury artist Michael Armstrong. The paintings in The Blurred Fringe of the Hyperbolic are predominantly on canvas with the addition of drawings and sculpture which explore the political, philosophical and scientific environments surrounding Armstrong which are reflections and commentaries on contemporary life.

Armstrong has over four decades of exhibiting history graduating from University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1976. He has been a tutor in art at the Timaru Aoraki Polytech since 1994. His many awards include the prestigious Francis Hodgkins Fellowship which he held in 1984.

You are invited along to the opening of both exhibitions at the Art Gallery on Sunday the 29thof January at 2pm. Both artists will be attendance, with Robinson giving a floor talk of his exhibition. The opening will also include a special musical performance by Melbourne sound artist Seth Rees which will be inspired by Robinson’s exhibition. All are welcome to attend this free public event at the Gallery.

James Robinson, Strange Attractor, 30 January – 25 February 2017

Michael Armstrong, The Blurred Fringes of the Hyperbolic, 30 January – 26 March 2017

END

© Scoop Media