Sumer is commercial art gallery based in Aotearoa New Zealand, working with artists from across Oceania and internationally. Its intergenerational program features work from a breadth of practitioners, from renowned to emerging and outlier artists. The gallery aims to support artistic practices that are critically-engaged and inspired—practices that extend our understanding and appreciation of contemporary art and ideas. We value and champion experimentation, diversity and inclusivity.
Tom Kreisler was born in Argentina in 1938, to a Jewish family who had left Barcelona to escape the Spanish civil war, coming to Buenos Aires by way of Vienna in 1936-37. Soon after the sudden death of his father, and in light of his rebellious and truant behaviour, he was presented with two options by his mother: work in his uncle’s millinery factory, or spend a period of time with his Aunt Edith and Uncle George in Christchurch, New Zealand. He leapt at the later opportunity and so when he was 13, he boarded a ship alone that would take him to these distant shores where he would spend much of his life.
Over the course of subsequent years, Kreisler was consistently reminded of his foreignness in this new land, but it was through his art practice that he was able to ruminate on this unique position and provide a socially, politically, and culturally dense body of work that resonates to this day. It is a testament to this artist’s prescience that his work has continued to grow in stature in more recent years, more than two decades after this artist’s passing.
Within his lifetime and since, Kreisler’s work has been exhibited widely throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as select exhibitions in Australia, Mexico, and the United States. His work is represented in important public collections across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, including The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Chartwell Collection/Auckland Art Gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery, Sarjeant Gallery, Waikato Museum, Rotorua Museum and The Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Ella Sutherland works across the fields of visual arts and publishing. Her practice visually engages with architecture, the written and social spaces of queer communities in the early twentieth century, and the poetic potential of letterforms. She is particularly interested in the architecture of interior spaces, and the architecture that replaced Modernism’s heroics and clarity with objects and domestic spaces that secured privacy and held mystery—spaces that encouraged acts of refusal, concealment. Eileen Gray’s architectural practice, the language of writer Djuna Barnes, and Natalie Clifford Barney’s literary salon are influential as spatial precedents that offer an alternative to the dominant mode of built, written and social space. With this in mind, her paintings often employ obstruction as a compositional constraint, placing the viewer at the threshold of a private, concealed or ambiguous scene. There’s a desire to read the shapes in her paintings as windows or doors, yet they could also be viewed as folding screens or the ripples of heavy curtains. So are they something to look through, or to conceal, or both? Her paintings have an immediate visual impact. The colour palettes are often limited and tightly controlled. Her practice as a book designer influences her paintings and how she approaches composition, thinks about seriality, and colour. So despite the flatness of the paint application there is also an absorbing sense of depth to her works.
Ella Sutherland (b. 1987, Auckland, New Zealand) lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Her work has been shown widely throughout New Zealand and international venues including Monash Museum of Art, Melbourne; UNSW Galleries, Sydney; 12th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju and Objectspace, Auckland. She was the recipient of the 2020 Creative New Zealand Visual Arts Residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, which has been postponed till October 2021.
Zina Swanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations draw on plant-related lore, and while they’re often humorous and uncanny they also hint at a darker view of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Her paintings are detailed, precise. The visual pleasure of her use of repetition is also undeniable: a silhouette of a head composed of pressed forget me not flowers; a skirting of blades of grass and “fake” four-leaf clovers that rings the gallery; two walls of painted freckled noses appearing to close in on a blooming tiger lily. Though take a step back from this last work, and the noses collectively could be mistaken for a pair of menacing wasp nests. Swanson aims to unsettle. Her practice has an ongoing relationship with several texts including Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s infamous The Secret Life of Plants (1973), Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells (2003) by CIA lie-detector specialist Cleve Backster, and Animal and Plant Lore (1899). What Swanson has in common with these “pioneers” of plant research is an inquisitiveness bordering on suspicion in the beauty, complexity, and potential of plants. Still, there is always a human presence in her works—the outline of a face, noses, a hand—or something that suggests a human has been here: a window, neatly arranged sticks. These works are often smaller in scale, though this is one of their strengths. They’re scaled for an interaction with the viewer that is personal, intimate, and so wonderfully unnerving.
Zina Swanson (b. 1981, Christchurch, New Zealand) lives and works in Christchurch, New Zealand. She has exhibited extensively with solo and group presentations at most of New Zealand’s top galleries and museums. These include the Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington and Artspace Aotearoa. Her works are also held in the collections of the Wallace Arts Trust, Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and The Dowse Art Museum, and she has been the recipient of the prestigious Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, and in 2014 was an Apexart New York Inbound Resident.
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