The Whakatipu Chronicle (2024)

Previously exhibited in Pittsburg, Houston and at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington, Te Rongo Kirkwood’s time-travelling, evocative Kākahu (cloak), Meremere (2021) was also awarded the premier Bullseye Glass Design Prize in 2022. Featured alongside the soaring, transformative Whiwhi Part II (Present) (2016), we witness Kirkwood’s multi-media expertise and rare unity of tradition and form, emotion and spirit.

Ambiguously titled, Dick Frizzell’s important BoHoTIKIs continue his long-term investigation into a modernist construct of the tiki form and conversation with the formal values of modernist abstract art. Accompanying the figurative presence, indeterminate space, geometric shapes and overlapping planes of his new tiki works is the simply beautiful, commandingly delivered Pink Roses (2023).

In his acclaimed career, Neil Dawson’s use of fluxing space, the architecture of line and intrinsic role performed by shadow have been amongst his most distinctive stylistic tools. The new Renovation works see him returning to the narratives of his early career. His long-term conversation with form, presence/substance and ethereality is explored in two key feather works alongside the globe-like Reflections – Halos (2017) where the perils of global warming are demonstrated by the rising water line.

Simon Edwards’ Kekerengu Dreamtime #27 (2023) and Prospector (2022) on first viewing seem mono-tonal but through the atmospheres, occlusions and fracturing spaces, colour slowly emerges, natural phenomena occur, landscapes morph and alter. In the sensuous and unsettling Chance Landing (2020) and Spilled Sublime (2020) we see again Edwards’ restraint as well as his signature delivery of vast majesty, dream-like quality and polychromatic glow. In sharp contrast, Neil Frazer’s silhouetted southern alpine landscapes examine the immensity, brutality and structural peril, of which Shadow Peak (2022) is an outstanding example.

Karl Maughan’s acclaimed celebration of garden architecture in Tukituki River (2023) sits alongside Yuki Kihara’s Aotea’ula series of commemorative necklace and lei-like forms comprised of native plants and flowers. Darryn George’s Waterlilies #4 (2021) presents three-level parables of loss and metaphors of the human spirit.

In Fish Face, Globe Trotter and Pearly Whites (2021) Joanna Braithwaite’s much-admired, searing use of anthropomorphic humour delivers uncompromising messages about our behaviours and the perils to all kind.

Two new multi-faceted, form altering corten steel sculptures RALM and SUJK (2023) by Ben Pearce accompany Neil Adcock’s emblematic, equally figurative Kaitiaki II (2022).