Shane Cotton / Melbourne Art Fair 2008
SHANE COTTON / MELBOURNE ART FAIR 2008
Gow Langsford Gallery Stand C39
Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne
30 July - 3 August 2008
Gow Langsford Gallery will participate at the Melbourne Art Fair 2008 with a solo exhibition of new painting by Shane Cotton. Having attended the Fair almost consecutively since its inception in 1988, this is the first time Gow Langsford will exhibit the work of a single artist. Shane Cotton will exhibit a newly developed suite of paintings and works on paper completed during his three month residence at Artspace in Sydney earlier this year.
A limited edition catalogue published by Gow Langsford Gallery will complement the featured works. Entitled Shane Cotton: The Extended Act of Looking, the booklet contains full colour reproductions of selected works, along with an insightful essay by Artspace Sydney Director, Blair French. French writes;
"Shane Cotton's new works...reveal a particular intensity of focus upon the act of looking: an act that involves both visual examination - scrutiny - and imagination. Many of the works, both on paper and canvas, feature a range of outline shapes based on rock outcrops, headlands and stone-walls photographed by Cotton on his wanderings around Sydney's rocky coastal fringes (as well as sourced from landscape features elsewhere). Texture, shape and the projective form of these features assume a new intensity in the works, matching that of the Upoko Tuhituhi - literally 'marked' heads - that Cotton has also continued to work with in a studio above Woolloomooloo Bay on Sydney harbour. With rare but notable exceptions, these works have been stripped of contextualising detail, information or the associative relationships between multiple forms and figures. Instead we are faced with singular forms or shapes - cut-outs of sorts - rendered in black and deep blue and in sharp outline against stark white grounds. Intense, concentrated looking fixes objects and scenes in the mind's eye. But concentration has its limits, those boundaries beyond which lies excess, a space of blurred certitude, of unconscious rearrangement of stimuli. This is the space of encounter with Cotton's new work."
Born in Upper Hutt in 1964, Shane Cotton (Ngati Rangi, Ngati Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) rose to prominence in 1993 with his now trademark sepia-toned 'history' paintings which explored the political and social complexities of New Zealand's early cross-cultural interface. Since then Cotton has produced a phenomenal body of work establishing himself as one of New Zealand's most collectable living artists. Continually evolving, refining and reinventing his practice, Cotton has managed to produce paintings that deeply resonate with New Zealand viewers whilst also remaining accessible to wider audiences in addressing universal concerns such as globalisation, post-colonialism, spirituality, self-determination, cross-cultural exchange and identity.
Gow Langsford Gallery gratefully aknowledges the support of Creative New Zealand