Föenander Galleries are taking a focused presentation of new works by:
Michael Dell
Monica Rani Rudhar
Monique Lacey
Nick Herd
Vishmi Helaratne
Each of these contemporary practitioners is renowned for their exceptional skill and strong conceptual foundation.
While their practices are diverse, themes in the work proposed work for the fair explore themes of desire, tradition, banality, longing and loss; navigating ideas of disconnection and identity.
Additionally, the presentation places an emphasis on the formal and material aspects of making, with each practitioner exploring the relationship of the surface and material, to the substrate of the work.
Michael Dell’s paintings shift from subject to non-subject, from representation to abstraction, where both modes of visual discourse reveal an evident attention to materiality and the static tension between picture surface and picture depth.Backlit Fields is a continuation of that studio practice. This exhibition, consisting of predominately landscape work is based from an ongoing observation of certain locations from the rural outskirts of Whakatū Nelson, where he lives. These paintings are based on roadside views from the Moutere Highway and the Takaka Valley.
Through photographing these locations and using the images as a reference point, he physically appropriates the camera’s gaze, reducing the images to a visual perception of a view, or scene, by painting them. Any formal relationship between the photograph and the painting becomes more disproportional through Dell’s studio process, in his thinking and choice of materials. While these landscape paintings can seem to be grounded in that particular genre of art history, there is a present time ambivalence and everyday commonplace approach towards the chosen subjects that suggests a stronger interest in abstraction, rather than objective representation. The landscapes in Dell’s paintings are reduced to a single motif - where the subject sits within the processes and constructs of picture making.
Michael Dell graduated from Canterbury University School Of Fine Art in 1994. Since that time he has exhibited throughout New Zealand, internationally in Japan, and more recently in a solo show Distant Pictures in Berlin, Germany in 2024. Dell is a recipient of numerous awards, including two of New Zealand’s premier national drawing awards; the Cranleigh Barton Drawing Award in 1993, while in his final year at art school, and more recently the 2019 Parkin Drawing Prize. His work is held in various Public collections, including:
Christchurch City Art Gallery / Te Puna o Waiwhetū, The University of Auckland / Waipapa Taumata Rau, The Suter Gallery / Te Aratoi o Whakatū, Waikato Museum of Art and History / Te Whare Taonga o Waikato., The University of Auckland Art Collection Waipapa Taumata Rau, The Ballin Collection, The Parkin Collection, Te Pūkenga Whanganui, The Kellihur Trust, The National Bank Art Collection, Tokyo Bank Collection & The Art House Trust.
Monica Rani Rudhar is an artist working on Gadigal Land across video, performance and sculpture. Born to Indian and Romanian migrant parents, her work speaks to longing and loss as she navigates the cultural disconnection that stems from the complexities of her multi-racial ethnicity. Her work is delicately personal and takes the shape of a restorative autobiographical archive that seeks to record her own histories where these stories can exist permanently, unlike those that have been passed down orally from her family which remain fragmented.
Rudhar graduated from University of New South Wales with a BFA in Art and Design (2021) and her practice attempts to restore familial histories, traditions and rituals that have been dispersed by migration, drawing on the labour required to move past barriers that stand in the way of reforging connections. Monica’s sculptures focus on her personal relationship to South East Asian Jewellery and its power in bridging a connection to her heritage. Rooted in the significant events where certain pieces have either been lost, gifted or taken away, Monica draws on how these totemic objects unite her with her distant family who live overseas, and a culture that she feels disconnected from. The significance of these objects is exemplified through scale and repetition which act to memorialise these heirlooms and give permanence to oral histories.
As a testament to Monica’s status as one of the most exciting emerging artists working in Australia, in 2024 she was been curated into three public exhibitions across NSW and Victoria, with major installations at: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Primavera), Bunjil Place Gallery, Chau Chak Wing Museum. Earlier this year Rudhar won the 2025 Blacktown City Art Prize and in 2023 she was the recipient of the Art Incubator grant, as well as the winner of the 2023 Gosford Regional gallery Emerging Art Prize.
Monique Lacey's practice finds an initial footing in Minimalism. While her work embraces the manufactured, utilitarian materials of the world as found objects, there is an emphatic emphasis on interventions as a maker. Her practice utilises apparently destructive gestures in order to create the work, and may offer a playful critique of Minimalism and it’s tensions between surface and form, image and object – collapsing the distinction between sculpture and painting.
Lacey’s works begin with new commercial packaging materials purchased at local hardware stores which offer structural givens of both volume and surface. These flat-packed materials are assembled and then covered with plaster, paint, resin, rubber, wax, varnish and pigments which act as both binding agents and new surfaces to conceal or reveal the structure underneath.
While Lacey adherer’s to truth to materials, these materials are also used to construct a level of artifice in the work. The transformation and elevation of the ordinariness of the humble cardboard box fascinates me. The initial building up of each form is countered by acts of crushing the cardboard boxes, which results in their forms being both damaged and substantially reconfigured. This act of crushing utilises my bodyweight, and might be variously read as playful, aggressive, cathartic or darkly humorous. Truth Untold seeks to complicate the values associated with certain materials and the codes of art – a cardboard box as inexpensive and pedestrian, its coating of paint an embellishment of decorated skin – and leave these productive tensions unresolved.
Monique Lacey graduated from Whitecliffe with a Master of Fine Arts (First Class) in 2018 and has exhibited widely across Aotearoa since 2011. In 2023 Lacey exhibited at Miami Art Week as well as in Houston, Texas, and the same year she was part of the curated show Disbend-Suspend Italy. Lacey has also been a regular finalist in a number of art awards, including Glaister Ennor Graduate Art Awards, Wallace Art Awards, Molly Morpeth Canday and the Walker and Hall, Art Awards and has work in public, private and corporate collections in Australasia, Europe, USA & Asia
Vishmi Helaratne’s practice extends to creating connections through community, performance, and collective experience. Born and raised in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, they graduated with a BFA from the College of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales, Australia (2018) and undertook the UNSW Fowlers Gap research programme in Australia, the same year. They have recently exhibited at UNSW Galleries, Australia (2019), PlayStation gallery, Pōneke/Wellington (2021) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia (2019) as well as Fonander Galleries (2024)
While addressing the significant and complex histories of Sri Lanka and their own upbringing in Australia & Aotearoa, Helaratne delves into the politics of identity, presenting speculative meditations of past, present, and future worlds. Drawing upon their culinary background, Helaratne combines gastronomic and painting techniques to create luscious and surprising textures and perspectives in an ongoing exploration of social customs, hospitality, multiculturalism, sensory language, and storytelling.
Vishmi uses colour and texture to create three-dimensional forms on flat wood surfaces. Applying successions of numerous blobs, dots, and waves all placed very close together, they construct texturally complex colourful landscapes and figures. To create their compositions they mix moulding paste with different paints and pigments, and use a piping bag to apply the mixture — an apt tool as their connection with cooking and food is significant to their art. Growing up in a Sri Lankan home, the main form of creativity that they witnessed regularly was the construction of a meal, made up of several different dishes that all contribute their own flavour, texture and colour to the overall dining experience. Helaratne’s experience as a chef amplified an interest in culinary experimentation, while simultaneously feeding their passion for painting as another visual format.
Their playful approach offers a wide range of biographical subject matter - from temples, to dining tables, to good names for cats and our connection to ‘the divine’. They draw from their experience of everyday cultural hybridity, being a Sri Lankan Australasian, taking inspiration from a range of sources like the intricate beading of saris, the icing on the elaborate birthday cakes their mother makes, and the bright colours and various sculptural elements of Sri Lankan temples. As they explain, “we learn to trust our own hands; we feed ourselves with our hands and create with them too”
Nick Herd, born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau, is currently based in Sydney Australia. Painting has always been a part of Herd’s life - gradually taking over - as his practice explores what it means to be human. Herd’s current practice depicts abstracted human subjects and floral arrangements, both representing a captivating study of existence. His energetic brushstrokes preserve a subtle interplay of emotion, vulnerability, and a resilience that define living species. Herd’s work is characterised by expressionistic mark making and unrefined - sometimes grotesque - figurative depiction which navigate the tensions between embodiment and liminality. His thick gestural application of paint, explores the performative nature of painting and the physical discharge of energy and anxiety; where the subject becomes a vessel for contemplating the human experience.
Herd undertook a Bachelor in Art and Design at AUT and recent His solo exhibitions include Dear Georgie, I've been painting, Jerico Contemporary, Sydney, Australia (2023), She Loves You, Lindberg Galleries, Melbourne, Australia (2022), Bloom, Parlour Projects, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand (2021), and Fool on a Hill, Lindberg Galleries, Melbourne, Australia (2017). His selected group exhibitions include, Group Show, Lindberg Galleries, Melbourne, Australia (2017) and We Are The Ones, Copenhagen (2017).
