Pete Wheeler: Folk Art of the Apocalypse

Recently, on the occasion of an overview of the artist's work held by the Wallace Arts Trust collection, spanning the years 2004-2019, Sir James Wallace remarked that Pete Wheeler 'is by no means as well-known in New Zealand as he should be. In fact, he is recognised much more in Berlin and Florence, where he had a major exhibition in 2011’. Exceptionally, 'Folk Art of the Apocalypse' makes available to inhabitants of Dunedin a set of new works by this significant painter. While he, his wife and three children currently reside in Berlin, they were caught out by the nationwide lockdown, which they spent in Broad Bay, where a number of these new paintings were created.

Born 1978, in Timaru, New Zealand, Pete holds a BFA (2000) from the Otago Polytechnic and 'describes Dunedin as his "home city ".... Dunedin is where he returns to and where many of his good friends live' (ODT, 25 June 2020). He has exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally in galleries such as Buia Gallery, NY, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch, Poggiali e Forconi, Florence, and Whitespace Gallery, Auckland.

His primary engagement is with painting as an activity that seeks no other justification outside itself. He works almost exclusively in oil on canvas. He specifies: ‘Somehow, I just love putting colour on a surface. It’s just the way it is. I think art is just something inherently in us as kids, and some of us carry that through life’. His later paintings are often developed with reference to found photographs, which he re-interprets liberally; he is drawn to a particular image (to which he frequently returns more than once) because of the way it suggests a potential painting as a play of colour, texture, form and composition.

These paintings remain, nonetheless, largely figurative and fundamentally enigmatic. Wheeler comments that ‘I am interested in a narrative that considers the relationship between our reality and the metaphysical’. He steadfastly refuses to elaborate on the nature and import of that relationship, though his work typically elicits a strong response from the viewer.

Alistair Fox, for example, considers 'Folk Art of the Apocalypse' a response to the coronavirus pandemic, emerging out 'an enforced lockdown…the paintings in this exhibition being either created during the lockdown, or else presented to be viewed in the context of the pandemic'. In Fox’s terms, they serve to underline 'a generational failure--the failure of the older generation to provide a world in which the young can thrive'.