Aratoi is helping celebrate the anniversary of the Print Council of Aotearoa, which has been promoting contemporary fine art printmaking for 20 years.
The Masterton-based museum is holding an exhibition – opening on Saturday, March 4 – to mark the milestone and showcase the art medium.
The prints’ range of themes includes ancient mythological stories, Shakespeare, ecological maps, rewriting whakapapa, and exploring climate change.
Programme manager Becky Bateman said the exhibition will help introduce people to fine art prints.
“Sometimes, it is obvious if something is a print, other times it’s not so clear,” she said.
“They’re so varied and interesting. There’s such a range of themes and abstracts.”
Among the prints will be ‘The Stranger’ from local artist Jo Lysaght.
The museum currently has two new exhibitions that opened last Saturday: Conversations Through Time, and Burn It Down.
Conversations Through Time is an exhibit by Kirsty Gardiner who combined her works with early 20th-century painter Alice Hosking, who is famous for her paintings of native flowers.
“Kirsty is a ceramicist who creates these creations of native birds,” Bateman said. “She’s linked her ceramics with the sketches from Alice Hosking. There’s been quite a time between them, about 100 years. It’s nice to have that combination of two very different types of artworks, and one’s been inspired by the other.”
Meanwhile, Burn It Down is the first exhibition Sarah McClintock has curated since becoming the Aratoi director.
It combines the works of seven artists who use fire, destruction, and obsolescence in their work to highlight the fragility of our world, ourselves, and our memories. From domestic objects to black holes the final artworks reveal that it is the very fragility of these things that make them precious and in need of our care.
“She’s handpicked the artworks, which all have the same theme of fire,” Bateman said.
“Nina van Duijnhoven made jewellery out of bits of burnt paper. It’s a weird thing to imagine, you’d think they would be too fragile, but Nina has made them into beautiful bits of jewellery.”
Lee Woodman’s works are displayed through an overhead projector.
“He’s got these amazing projections about the fragility of memory Each of these pictures are slightly distorted.”
Other artists featured in the exhibit are Pat Hanly, Tracy Keith, Victoria McIntosh, Amelia Pascoe, and Sandra Schmid.
