Tag: Art

Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka stands as one of the most compelling contemporary artists working from Aotearoa New Zealand today, distinguished by a practice that fuses ancestral Tongan knowledge with experimental, often monumental, painterly processes. His work is rooted in the sacred art of ngatu tāʻuli, Tongan blackened tapa cloth, yet it consistently pushes beyond ethnographic expectation,…

Without totally orientalizing painter Tony Guo’s surreal vaudevilles, it’s difficult not to see the (violently) anxious eroticism of manga comic artist Junji Ito in his work. Like Ito, Guo’s figures suffer from an ecstatic dysmorphia (for example, Gardeners, 2020, a fractured self-portrait in which the artist literally dismembers himself). But unlike Ito the source of…

At just 9 years old, Eastern-Southland-based artist Paul McLachlan’s eyes were opened to the potential of art by the modernist masterpieces on display at the Guggenheim exhibition that toured to Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1996. This profound experience ignited a lifelong passion for art, leading him to pursue a career as an artist. ‘This…

Cartoonist Sharon Murdoch finds solace from covering the daily parade of political swine by literally shrinking her subjects down to size. She explains this system when I ask how she keeps herself psychologically intact when facing a daily diet of malice, lies, bigotry and bombast from the current coalition Government. It’s been a rambling, revealing…

by Andrew Paul Wood Palmerston North-based Jordan Quinnell was born and raised in Ōpunake on the Taranaki coast, and his whakapapa is to Ngā Ruahine, Taranaki and Tūwharetoa iwi. He has a bachelor’s degree, post-graduate diploma (with Merit), and Masters of Māori Visual Art (with Distinction) through the Toioho ki Āpiti Māori Arts programme at…

At the State Hermitage Museum, people are constantly taking selfies in front of Black Square (1915). Whether or not we consider it to be a ‘correct’ way to engage with an artwork, selfie-taking is increasingly common in art museums world-wide; it’s a contemporary cultural phenomenon, with audiences typically singling out a particular ‘iconic’ work to…