The opening event on 27 November was a shared end-of-year function for the Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery, with about 520 guests here to celebrate and have a first view. The formal part culminated in the presentation of a cheque for $40,000 from our Friends to the Christchurch Art Gallery Trust. This will enable the purchase of a 2009 painting by Seraphine Pick, Hole in the sky, included in our recent survey exhibition which opens at City Gallery Wellington next year for the International Festival of the Arts (and thence to Dunedin Public Art Gallery). It is a marvellously generous gift, the result in turn of the generosity of all who support the annual art event.

The evening before had seen the Trust and Christchurch City Council sign an innovative Challenge Grant Agreement whereby donations made to the Trust for collection development are matched dollar-for-dollar by Council up to an annual value of about $200,000.  This excellent initiative will assist us to buy more significant works for the collection.  It is a fitting endorsement of our direction and of the great value we all place on the core business of building and preserving the collection, and providing access to it in varying ways.

I thank all who have contributed to re-thinking the display of the collection: curators, designers, educators, public programmes staff, conservators, all our technical and other support staff. It was fascinating to hear a wide range of the talks and exchanges scheduled during the opening weekend and to see so many of our volunteer guides and visitors there to pick up words of wisdom from artists Robin White, Fiona Pardington and John Reynolds and all the other experts we asked to respond to a part or section of the new display.

I am increasingly aware of the multiple ways in which collections may be displayed and it has been interesting also to see other collections recently re-hung (the Australian galleries in the Queensland Art Gallery during the opening of the APT in Brisbane; and on 11 December the new multi-hued collection rooms in Dunedin Public Art Gallery, opening on the occasion of its 125th anniversary). Ours stands up well and is exactly right for us now, but then (as I noted in a 2003 review of Christchurch Art Gallery when it had just opened): ‘…there is a positive and generative sense in which art galleries are always incomplete.’ (Journal of New Zealand Art History, vol 24, 2003, p 3).

Brought to Light is the end of a great deal of planning and extra effort for us, but also the beginning of the next phase in this Gallery’s contribution to the city and the fabric of art in Aotearoa New Zealand. The rewards which we especially value from now on are even stronger patterns of visitation and an increasing sense of engagement with the art on display.

Jenny Harper
Director

There are many reasons I return to Angus’s A goddess of mercy, but I think the strongest and simplest reason is the sense of connection between the sitter and the artist.

Rita painted the portrait in part as a tribute to her sister Edna, incorporating the pattern from one of Edna’s favourite housecoats into the floral print of the goddess’s skirt. She made it after the end of the Second World War, and it expresses her vision of a more peaceful future and her belief in the vital role women could play in averting war.

There’s a lot of art history in it – Angus is referring to the Western tradition of Madonna paintings – but the painting addresses the here and now.

Angus’s contemporary goddess watches over a beautiful, hopeful world, while the melting snow, ploughed fields and yellow crocus herald the arrival of spring and the possibility of new beginnings.

The painting is going to hang centrally on a wall of portraits of women by women from the collection. We think they’ll enjoy each other’s company.

Over several days a couple of weeks ago, this work grew like a small art-city in front of the last and largest wall in the gallery.

It’s the result of John’s rummagings in a book called the Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms. But where dictionaries impose order on art, John cheerfully disorders it.

He’s taken hundreds of terms out of the dictionary and brought them back into the material world, spreading them in silver ink across more than 1,650 small paintings, from ‘abacus’ all the way through to ‘zeitgeist’.

They’re all stacked up on one long table – and by long, I mean enormous. The result is a kind of art historical jumble sale, a teetering heap of history and culture.

The work was inspired by tables stacked with products that Reynolds encountered on the streets of Hong Kong. And it’s a great work to see at the end of a big collection show, because it insists that art history isn’t a procession of masterpieces bolted to the walls forever. It’s up for grabs and up in the air.

A permanent work in progress.

There are plenty of traditional landscapes in Brought to Light, but also some wonderful contemporary works that come at the idea of place from new angles – literally going to work on real pieces of the landscape.

Joe Sheehan’s sculpture does this stunningly.

It started when the artist went for a walk on Mahara Beach in 2008 and found two things – a crushed plastic milk bottle and a large greywacke stone. In Mother he brings these two things together, something very ancient and something very new.

Sheehan’s well known for carving pounamu, but here he has carved the grey stone into a perfect copy of a piece of throwaway rubbish. The transformation is startling. The bottle’s crushed form and its open mouth start to suggest a twisted and expressive body.

It’s like Sheehan has made a portrait of nature under extreme pressure.

Staff are busy with the final details before Brought to Light opens to the public on Saturday.

Christchurch has a great collection of Frances Hodgkins paintings, but it’s received a massive boost with the recent arrival of a powerhouse group of long-term loans from the British Council. And this one is the best of a very good bunch.

She completed it just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. The English artist John Piper connected her paintings from this time with the war, saying that ‘humanity at war is the emotional background for these rubbish heaps among the out-houses of a south Dorset farm.’

But it’s the brightness of her palette that stays with me.

Hodgkins is almost seventy when she makes this painting, but she has lost none of her verve. The painting is intensely lyrical – familiar forms so radically simplified that parts of the painting start to approach abstraction.

You’ll see it straight ahead when you walk into the new collection spaces.