Studio 18D (2023)

In Studio 18D we welcome and announce the representation of Sandro Kopp, Roger Mortimer and Tony Lane. Also featured are new works by Simon Edwards and Emily Siddell.

Sandro Kopp is a German-New Zealand painter based in Scotland who is in New Zealand regularly. He has exhibited in New York, Milan, Paris, London, Germany, Edinburgh amongst others. His work explores classical painting traditions and the intersections of digital technology with an especial emphasis upon the drawing process and abstracted mark-making. The Rosenthaler paintings are part of a series made for Wes Anderson’s film ‘The French Dispatch’. Applauded as “the true star” 1 of that acclaimed film, The Rosenthaler Suite portraits are “almost totally abstract, thickly encrusted impasto, flesh from the tube” with a “very abstract dark kind of field around the flesh-coloured” 2 dynamic, gestural centre.

Roger Mortimer’s paintings subvert and distort while taking the viewer on a journey. He uses “medieval calligraphy and maritime maps” as “tools for location.” He has developed a unique visual language which is “interacting with the iconography and recreating dense compositions of newly reconstructed symbolic material. The results are unsettling: an admission of medieval dreams and nightmares onto the reimagined.” He mashes up time, conflating “past-present-future, waka and modern warships, medieval iconography and Te Ao Maori”3 into parabolic tales that explicitly reference Dante’s Divine Comedy while resolutely examining the hierarchies of imperialism and colonialism acutely particular to New Zealand.

Tony Lane has exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally. He is an explorer and a symbolist. His paintings reveal a seminal relationship to the object, exploring the “resonances imagery accretes through many centuries of artistic usage.” His works are not didactic but comprised of “residual ambiguity which makes the effect so powerful.” This sense of mystery, of something not wholly apprehended or fully present is “rooted in religion and mysticism.” It is “art to the glory of art.”4

Simon Edwards’ new paintings are located in Kaikoura. Kekerengu being the name of the active fault line there. Located south of the Kaikoura township with the dramatic Kaikoura Range alongside the Pacific Ocean, Edwards uses that scale contrast to explore and communicate considerable sensations of awe, wonder and the sublime.

Emily Siddell’s necklace forms are plural cultural objects, informed by the Pacific, imbued with the metaphoric symbolic languages of love and place. Comprised of recycled, reworked wine bottle glass, Siddell titles these “Pétillant” to acknowledge the ‘effervescences’ contained.

1. Miss Rosen, “The Making of the French Dispatch, As Seen by Artist Sandro Kopp,” Anothermag.com, 26 October 2021.
2. Sandro Kopp, email correspondence with Stephen Higginson, 27 July 2023.
3. Billie Lythberg, “Everyday Apocrypha, Apocroypha: The Maps of Roger Mortimer,” Index, August 2021, p. 8-9.
4. John Russell Taylor, “Tony Lane in London in Veiled from Sight: the paintings of Tony Lane,” Dreamtime Gallery, London 1997 p. 2-4.