EXHIBITIONS: Philippa Blair - Out of Line

Artist:

Philippa Blair

Title:

Philippa Blair with "Phoenix"

Medium:

Oil on canvas

Size:

1524 x 2440mm

Date:

2008

Price:

$16,500

Sold:

No

Preview Opening:  

Tuesday 1st June - 5.30pm to 7.30pm

Click Here to view Works on Paper included in the "Out of Line" exhibition.

A wonderful new show by expatriate artist Philippa Blair begins in June.  This inlcudes a fabulous selection of a dozen of Blair's latest works.  A glossy catalogue has also been produced, which is available from the Gallery ($5) The text for this catalogue was written by New Zealand art historian and writer Dr Anne Kirker.

Philippa Blair has an extensive career of over 35 years garnering international success and in the process becoming renowned in New Zealand as one of our foremost abstract painters. In her latest exhibition, “Out of Line” at the Warwick Henderson Gallery, Blair makes a welcome return to New Zealand.

As an internationally respected action painter, the process of mark-making and the materiality of paint is also an important component of her work. The artist explores this painting process with drips, splatters, poured paint and painted lines. Movement is also an important aspect of Blair’s work, and this is enhanced and reflected in gestures and movements while she paints. The canvas is often laid on the ground and worked around, similarly to Jackson Pollock. Like Pollock her work has no fixed view point and the ‘all over’ painting style means the compositions remain unfixed. This is a deliberate approach by Blair to deny a singular interpretation of the work; the paintings reflect an amalgam of influences from music, industrial architecture, urban noise, nature and cinema as well as personal memories and visual sensations.

This latest show is a departure from previous work and as Blair states this exhibition is a ‘dramatic and more monochromatic series’. More white over-painting is employed to create negative space, while black becomes more dominant in some paintings. In other work, the clever use of colour, another Philippa Blair trademark, appears to be both harmonious and at times a successful anomaly, a gestural abstract wonderland which plays with the viewer’s senses in an almost whimsical manner.

Dr. Anne Kirker, who recently viewed the new works in Blair’s studio in San Pedro on the edge of LA, says there are “…some departures to what is now the practice of an artist in her prime…For this artist, like many others, creative expression is the summation of a maelstrom of influences brought about by a change in living situation, which provides a new iconography, but also memories…travel undertaken, encounters made, and all the sensations involved in engaging with early 21st century life. The paintings coming out of the San Pedro studio are hence predictably dynamic and challenging… There is a strong linear pulse to Blair’s compositions nowadays as though the painted sweeps of squeegee, the fine lattice webs and the spare spray-gun tracks, work as a dense journey. Whether single or in diptych form, these canvases take you into a terrain that simultaneously evokes the senses, not only of sight but of music and sound, of the crackle of electronics, or the brute force of industry piercing the air”.¹

Blair uses maps and grids as a motif in her work, which reflect landscapes and as she explains: “it is a way to become acquainted with foreign lands”. (2)  In her new series these map-like compositions reference an aerial viewpoint of urban landscapes, from the industrial port town San Pedro, (the southern part of Los Angeles) “where the 110 freeway meets the Pacific Ocean”. This is a new gritty working environment for Blair, perhaps tempered with remembered snowcapped mountainscapes of New Zealand. One thing is certain this cacophony of multiple urban influences and visual sensations are completely captivating in this emphatic new series of work.

(1) Dr Anne Kirker, Auckland, April 2010 – Email to Warwick Henderson Gallery

(2) Philippa Blair, Artist, April 2010