NZ artworks headed for Venice Biennale
30 Apr 2009
Two of New Zealand’s leading artists are to spend six months exhibiting their work at the 2009 Venice Biennale - the world’s most significant visual arts event.
Sculptor Francis Upritchard and painter Judy Millar will join artists representing 90 countries at the 53rd International Art Exhibition in Venice from 7 June to 22 November 2009.
Prominent venues
The New Zealand artworks will be located in two prominent venues in the ancient city.
Judy Millar’s large scale installation 'Giraffe-Bottle-Gun' will herald the re-opening, after 30 years, of the regal Sant’ Antonin church close to the Arsenale, and en route to Giardini.
Francis Upritchard’s 'Save Yourself' will be exhibited in the smaller venue of Fondazione Claudio Buziol, close to the Rialto Bridge.
Project supporters, Creative New Zealand and the national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa - Museum of New Zealand, have agreed to bring the work home to exhibit at Te Papa for the New Zealand International Arts Festival in 2010.
Judy Millar: 'Giraffe-Bottle-Gun'
Judy Millar will take over the interior of the Sant’ Antonin church with her 'Giraffe-Bottle-Gun' exhibition.
Millar’s largest painting, a cylindrical piece, will sit in the centre of the ancient church.
Seven other odd-shaped canvasses of varying sizes will lean against the walls, highlighting their temporary location in Venice and provisional relationship with the former place of worship and belief.
Millar says 'Giraffe-Bottle-Gun' will instigate "an almost violent dispute" with the venue, between the great history of Venetian painting and the contemporary digitally-produced work.
Francis Upritchard: 'Save Yourself
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The installation 'Save Yourself' by Francis Upritchard will include clusters of figures and structures spread through three elegant chambers inside the Fondazione Claudio Buziol.
The figures have a handmade quality and are detailed with a psychedelic surface. Upritchard says they are searchers, dreamers and dancers consumed by their acts of meditation or lost in reverie.
Each grouping occupies an imaginary landscape that exists in an indeterminate historical period combining the antique and futuristic, and creating a scene that’s both familiar and unsettling.
Visitor magnet
New Zealand Commissioner of Venice Biennale Jenny Harper said each venue was interesting in its own right.
"There is no question that each artist will be able to realise their creative endeavours to the best advantage in these venues," she said.
Creative New Zealand’s Art Council chair, Alastair Carruthers said the exhibitions would be a magnet for international visitors to Venice during the six month period.
Te Papa’s significant investment in the project meant New Zealanders would also be able to experience what two of the country’s finest artists presented on behalf of the nation, he said.
Two works presented at previous Biennale are held in Te Papa’s collection: Jacqueline Fraser’s 2001 ‘A Demure Portrait of the Artist Strip Searched’ and Michael Stevenson’s 2003 ‘This is the TREKKA’.
Background:
New Zealand artist - Judy Millar
Judy Millar is considered one of New Zealand’s foremost painters.
Central themes in Millar’s large scale paintings include the relationships between canvas and paint, static and movement, and the place of painting in art history.
Judy Millar, who studied at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts, gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 1980, and a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in 1983. In 1989, she returned to the University of Auckland to study the writings of Italian feminist authors.
Millar gained an Italian government scholarship in 1990, and spent a year in Turin researching the work of Italian artists from the 1960s and 1970s. While in Turin, she became increasingly convinced that painting could still be a vital part of the contemporary artistic landscape.
New Zealand artist - Francis Upritchard
Francis Upritchard is a New Zealand artist living in London.
Upritchard has exhibited extensively in Aotearoa New Zealand, Europe and America since graduating from Canterbury University’s Ilam School of Fine Arts in 1997.
In 2006, Francis Upritchard was the winner of the Walters Prize - New Zealand’s most prestigious contemporary art prize.
A three-month hometown residency at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, in 2007-08, resulted in the exhibition ‘rainwob i'. A further residency at Artspace Sydney produced ‘rainwob ii’.
These exhibitions continued Upritchard’s exploration of utopian drives through fragments of real and fictional histories that are retrieved, reworked and reinvested with new meaning.
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