Artist

  • Dick Frizzell
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Featuring works spanning more than a decade, there will be final editions and exclusive discounts on offer for a limited time from 10 – 26 October only in our upstairs gallery.

As one of Aotearoa’s most celebrated, prolific, and at times controversial artists, Dick Frizzell (b.1943, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau) has painted, printed, and drawn a vast and idiosyncratic range of subjects borrowing from all manner of styles and genres. His diverse practice is a pastiche of landscape and still-life painting, portraits, cartoons, kitsch kiwiana, text and signage, alongside tongue-in-cheek tributes to artists including Pablo Picasso and Colin McCahon, and homages to movements such as Abstraction, Cubism, Impressionism, and Pop-Art.

Frizzell studied at Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in the 1960s before going on to work in advertising as an animator, commercial artist, and illustrator. Eventually he turned his hand to painting; boldly applying all that he had learnt from the commercial industry to draw both disciplines together. The result sees the artist continue making works that push at the boundaries of tradition, intertwining high-art and popular culture to consider painting from a fresh perspective. ‘It’s like the sacred and profane all mixed up, and that’s the point’, said Frizzell in a recent interview for The Good Oil Podcast, ‘… rolling the crass business of advertising directly into van Gogh.’

Since his first solo exhibition A-fishial Art Show (1976) Frizzell has gone on to exhibit extensively, with his work represented in public collections including Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū; The Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; and Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. He has published numerous art and children's books including Dick Frizzell: The Painter (2009); It’s All About the Image (2011); Me, According to the History of Art (2020); and The Sun Is a Star: A Voyage Through the Universe (2021).

Opening Hours

  • Tuesday - Friday 10am-5pm
  • Saturday 10am-4pm

Address

  • 42 Victoria Street
  • Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, 6011