News
January 2010 I TAG: James Cousins and Simon Ingram reviewed in Art Forum online
It is rare that international critics head this far into the South Pacific so we are especially pleased that our current exhibition TAG is reviewed in ARTFORUM online.
New York based critic Michael Wilson writes "Ranged around the space in ones and twos, the diminutive panels perform a variety of material and compositional stunts, the paired artists' contributions interacting neatly with each other to the degree that they nearly appear as products of a single hand. All the pictures make use of intense color, Cousins adding the counterpoint of allover textural effects, while Ingram relies on simple, linear brushwork." Read the full review online here or down load. 
May 2009 I James Cousins' catalogue Signal is now available
Signal is an exquisitely crafted full colour publication which documents James Cousins' recent exhibition of the same title at Gow Langsford Gallery. Signal includes an essay by Ruth Watson and is now available. Contact us to purchase or for more information.
James Cousins joins Gow Langsford Gallery
New Zealand painter James Cousins has exhibited extensively since the mid 1990s. His work has featured in international and local group exhibitions and in solo exhibitions in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. Last year Cousins work was selected for group shows Afterimage (Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland) and PX: A purposeless production / A Necessary Praxis (St Paul Street, Auckland).
In the introduction to the painting exhibition PX, Curator Leonard Emmerling suggests that Cousins work reflects an ambivalence towards painting. Certainly there is an element of contrast, or contradiction evident in the work. While the technically exquisite soft landscapes and organic forms that occupy his canvases owe much to the tradition of Romantic painting, Cousins works also feature hard-edged vinyl grids, fractured forms and shards of light and space. Such kaleidoscopic filters draw attention to the surface of the canvas and to the picture plane. In many cases they form a filmy barrier between the viewer and the background landscape. The original image is transformed: often fragmented, obscured and abstracted, but always enlivened.
Cousins has employed aspects of the local landscape over the course of his career. He is perhaps particularly known for his early grid works, which feature repetitive (though not identical) images divided by thick white grid lines. There is an element of the film reel present in these works and though the images are blurred and contain touches of the sublime, they are offset by, and tied to the technology of the present. More recently, Cousins works have become more abstracted and the grid format has become integrated within his landscapes through blocks of variegated colour, or thin vinyl additions to the canvas.
James Cousins holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury (1989) and a Master of Fine Arts from Elam (2004). He currently teaches at Elam School of Fine Arts and lives and works in Auckland.