Exhibition Opening
Tuesday 16 July, 5-7pmgowlangsfordgallery.co.nz
Join Gow Langsford Gallery on Tuesday 16 July from 5-7pm for the opening of Across the Earth: 100 Years of Colin McCahon at our Lorne Street Gallery.
To mark the centenary of Colin McCahon's birth, Gow Langsford Gallery celebrates the preeminent New Zealand modernist with an exhibition of his paintings on loose canvas. Across the Earth: 100 Years of Colin McCahon unites a collection of significant paintings that exemplify the artist's distinctive treatment of the New Zealand landscape, and demonstrates the austere spiritualism endemic to his practice. Focussing on loose canvases of McCahon's Muriwai period, the exhibition explores the immediacy of raw materials in the works of the giant of New Zealand painting.
Across the Earth features the Urewera Triptych (1975), a seminal work in McCahon's oeuvre which captures the majesty of the Urewera National Park and its people, Ngāi Tūhoe iwi. The epic three-panelled work is a sister painting to the Urewera Mural commissioned from McCahon to hang in the park's Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre. The use of loose canvas in the Urewera Triptych recalls the famed flags designed and carried by Tūhoe prophets Rua Kēnana and Te Kooti, whose names appear on the right panel.
For McCahon, painting on loose canvas offered his works urgency - by eliminating painting's more traditional stretchers and frames, he could confront his viewers more directly with the essence of the New Zealand landscape through raw material and his strikingly simple compositions.
Join Gow Langsford Gallery on Tuesday 16 July from 5-7pm for the opening of Across the Earth: 100 Years of Colin McCahon at our Lorne Street Gallery.
To mark the centenary of Colin McCahon's birth, Gow Langsford Gallery celebrates the preeminent New Zealand modernist with an exhibition of his paintings on loose canvas. Across the Earth: 100 Years of Colin McCahon unites a collection of significant paintings that exemplify the artist's distinctive treatment of the New Zealand landscape, and demonstrates the austere spiritualism endemic to his practice. Focussing on loose canvases of McCahon's Muriwai period, the exhibition explores the immediacy of raw materials in the works of the giant of New Zealand painting.
Across the Earth features the Urewera Triptych (1975), a seminal work in McCahon's oeuvre which captures the majesty of the Urewera National Park and its people, Ngāi Tūhoe iwi. The epic three-panelled work is a sister painting to the Urewera Mural commissioned from McCahon to hang in the park's Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre. The use of loose canvas in the Urewera Triptych recalls the famed flags designed and carried by Tūhoe prophets Rua Kēnana and Te Kooti, whose names appear on the right panel.
For McCahon, painting on loose canvas offered his works urgency - by eliminating painting's more traditional stretchers and frames, he could confront his viewers more directly with the essence of the New Zealand landscape through raw material and his strikingly simple compositions.
