Well-known New Zealand artist to speak at free event
Monday 12 September 2011, 1:50PM
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Christchurch audiences will have the chance to learn about the works of acclaimed New Zealand painter Shane Cotton at a free event to be held in the Christchurch Events Village later this month
Shane Cotton: Talking Painting will be held at the Geodome in the Christchurch Events Village in North Hagley Park on 20 September. Cotton will speak with Christchurch Art Gallery Senior Curator Justin Paton about the art of painting and some of the works that feature in his major upcoming exhibition The Hanging Sky.
The exhibition was due to open at Christchurch Art Gallery this year but has been postponed until 2012 because the Gallery is closed after the February and June earthquakes. It features a series of ‘skyscapes’ – full of soaring birds, ragged skywriting and plunging cliffs – which Cotton has created during the past five years.
Director Jenny Harper says Cotton’s illustrated talk is part of the ‘Gallery without walls’ initiative, which aims to ensure art and art-related programmes are available to the people of Christchurch while the Gallery’s doors are closed. “We know many Christchurch people have been missing the Gallery while it has been the focal point of our city’s recovery effort. We hope Shane Cotton: Talking Painting will give them a taste of some of the exciting exhibitions we are planning for when the Gallery re-opens,” she says.
Shane Cotton trained at Canterbury School of Fine Arts and is a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate. His work was seen in Christchurch recently in the Brooke Gifford exhibition Thirty-Six Years in the Zone at Chambers@241. He appeared in the 17th Biennial of Sydney last year and has also held solo shows at Rossi and Rossi Gallery in London and at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Sydney. His most recent New Zealand exhibition was praised in The New Zealand Herald as containing “paintings of a deliberation and weight almost unparalleled in recent art seen in Auckland.”
The talk is one of a series of Real New Zealand Festival events being held around the country during Rugby World Cup 2011 from 9 September to 23 October.
Shane Cotton: Talking Painting will be held at Christchurch Events Village from 6pm on 20 September.