THE DAISY CHAINS – 18 Nov – 18 Dec
Ahuriri Contemporary offers a chance to view works by contemporary New Zealand artists Peter Madden and Rohan Wealleans.
The Daisy Chains runs from 18 November to 18 December.
These contemporary New Zealand artists display an idiosyncratic regard of art and its history offering in their maximalism a way through to visual gardens that revel in joy. They are rethinking ‘the traditional mediums’ but still making ‘art objects,’ giving us access to alternative views on modernism and contemporary art. Selected by the artists from their personal collections, we see works create between them an interconnected world of abundance and delight. Singular but in a flock.
Madden cuts and appropriates images, meticulously scanned and re-sculpted into hyperbolic visual dramas. Images float on found objects, and poetic views of the ordinary are overwhelmed in a horror vacui. Through Madden’s profusion of images, everything seems alive with grandeur and drama. There is a sense of the implausible easing into the real. The poetic into the given.
Wealleans excavates a multitude of ultra-thin layers of paint, like a contemporary archaeologist. He carves into the strata revealing layers, unleashing trapped colour. In this hidden wilderness of the familiar, Wealleans locates found objects inside a mid-toned world of unease. Cut back into its surface like an unlicensed surgeon. His work exposes the tenuous relationship between objects and desire, in a hyper mediated world.
The two artists’ work is held in public and private collections alike, such as Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū, Te Papa, Dunedin public art gallery, Govert Brewster Gallery, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Ipswich Art Gallery, the Chartwell, Auckland and Wellington University collections.
