The exhibition presents a previously unexhibited suite of works by Martin Thompson (1956–2021). Thompson was a self-taught artist from the Wellington region who became renowned for his abstract drawings based on mathematical formulae.
The works in this exhibition were made in 2005 and 2006, during a period of production that culminated in his first solo exhibition in a public institution, Wellington’s City Gallery, a watershed moment which saw him present immersive, large-scale works for the first time in the form of poster-sized inkjet prints and wallpaper.
The remarkable thing about these works is that they significantly predate the wave of digital and post-internet painting that became a major force in the art market in the mid 2010s. Typified by luminaries Wade Guyton, Cory Arcangel, Tauba Auerbach and Seth Price, these practices responded to technology and the internet’s effects on aesthetics, culture and society. In a very ‘the medium is the message’ kind of way, they wielded both mechanical and traditional painting techniques with symbolic effect.
With their vivid, solid colour backgrounds and larger than expected scale, the works in this exhibition certainly speak more to the language of painting than we’d usually expect from Thompson. Although they look digital in nature, with imagery that appears variously as static, distortion, scrolling backgrounds, or the proto-representations of real world forms found in early computer games, Thompson’s work was not shaped by technological advancement or vast communication networks but by something more fundamental. His artistic direction was determined by Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s 1977 book on fractals,¹ which showed how simple mathematical rules can generate the complex structures we see in nature. The book championed the ‘art of roughness,’ which posited that even the messiest naturally occurring forms had an internal order and self-similarity, i.e. the property whereby parts of the object resemble the whole at different scales. From this perspective, the ‘art of roughness’ is nature's own artistry, a beauty found not in smooth, idealised Euclidean shapes, but in the intricate and seemingly messy reality of the natural world.
For years, Thompson sought ways to extend his drawings beyond the A3 and A4 graph paper he used and to gain better control over his colour palette. The works in Razzle Dazzle present a decidedly anti-digital approach to this problem of scale. Thompson used a Xerox machine to replicate, slice up, and reassemble aspects of his drawings to create much larger, more complicated compositions. In doing so, he furthered a rich artistic tradition. Even artists from New Zealand, like Billy Apple, Ralph Hotere and Paul Hartigan, used Xerox in their work. The technique is reminiscent of musicians like Brian Wilson and Brian Eno cutting and splicing audio tape.
Close inspection of these works' surfaces reveals a complex lattice of fine ridges that indicate where scalpel cuts have been made and edges have been butted up against one another. Intermittent smudges of high sheen indicate where excess glue has bled through and been wiped away. Each work is made from two panels, with one being the exact tonal reverse of the other, and each panel is assembled from many smaller pieces, some as small as 5mm square. By combining dense background colours with equally dense, uniform imagery in the foreground, he created a dazzling visual effect in which the two planes become interchangeable and difficult to define.
These works also bear witness to Thompson’s lived experience. A self-described ‘old hippy’ who identified as having Asperger Syndrome,² Thompson lived on the poverty line for much of his life,³ often carrying his work with him in a large folder. The compositions are adhered to thin box board, and their condition ranges from pristine to carrying the patina of an itinerant life; some are interrupted by missing pieces that have fallen away over time. The images we see today are a pragmatic retelling of a story that has survived the test of time.
Thompson’s work garnered significant international attention with his inclusion in the landmark 2005 exhibition Obsessive Drawing at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan. Curated by Brooke Anderson, the show made a splash because it brought forward the simmering debate about the role of the ‘outsider’ artist in the contemporary scene. Nearby, The Museum of Modern Art was paying attention. Their drawing collection had included work by self-taught artists since the 1930s, and with the rising profile of artists like Henry Darger and Martín Ramírez, such work had become essential for serious public collections to round out the story of modern art in America.
Thompson’s work has been exhibited extensively in commercial dealer galleries throughout New Zealand and internationally. His art is held in significant collections, including those of the American Folk Art Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and the Chartwell Collection. In 2015, his work was the subject of a major survey exhibition, ‘Sublime Worlds,’ at Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
The works in this exhibition are presented courtesy of a private collection.
Thompson died in Dunedin in 2021. He had lived there since 2007, having fallen in love with the city because it reminded him of Wellington in the 1970s.⁴
References
¹ Guthrie, Kim. "Martin Thompson." Artist Profile, 2018, https://artistprofile.com.au/martin-thompson/, . Accessed 5 Sept. 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Marchini, Gloria. "Martin Thompson." Outsider Art Now, 7 July 2014, , https://outsiderartnow.com/martin-thompson/. Accessed 5 Sept. 2025.
⁴ Hickman, Bill. "Acclaimed 'Obsessive' Artist Martin Thompson Has Died." Stuff, 8 Sept. 2021, www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/arts/126320155/acclaimed-obsessive-artist-martin-thompson-has-died. Accessed 5 Sept. 2025.
Throw is an exhibition of new paintings by Philip Kelly. The works belong to his ongoing, series of ‘Turntable’ paintings, which he has been making since 2019. The abstract images are comprised of circular forms, created by applying, removing, and manipulating paint on a rotating surface.
Prior to this new suite of paintings, Kelly made these works with watercolour on paper, placed on a record player. This body of work sees him replace the record player with an electric potter’s wheel, and his watercolours and paper with oil paints, gesso, and stretched canvas.
The choice of a potter’s wheel is significant. While ceramics have an ancient history as vessels for food and storytelling in many cultures, the studio pottery scene holds a unique place in New Zealand’s more recent cultural identity. Born from an era of broad import restrictions (from the 1930s to the mid-1980s), the country’s burgeoning ceramics scene produced works that are now supported by an enthusiastic and ever-growing collector’s market.
Kelly uses this tool of a potter not to shape clay, but to explore paint. On the one hand, these are non-objective paintings; they are not intended to represent anything but are explorations of form and colour. Almost musical in nature, they have their own rhythm, with peaks and troughs in tone, balance, and form. The entire making of the painting is laid out in front of you, recorded in the grooves and layers of the painted surface. Though a sitting might last for hours, each work is essentially made in a single session. Like the opening and closing of a camera’s shutter, these images capture a slice of time, encouraging you to look closely at the elements they contain.
On the other hand, Kelly is very aware of what he is doing and where he is doing it. Having spent many years of his life working as a designer outside of New Zealand, in New York, Shanghai and Amsterdam, it means something to be making these paintings here, and it means something to be making them now.
There is something beautiful about watching an object in motion when the motion itself creates a kind of meta-image. This experience is often only available through a lens: think of long-exposure cityscapes where car lights merge into glowing neon lines, or time-lapse sequences in nature documentaries where fleeting subjects become cyclical pulses against a constant background.
These meta-images have a pervasive place in art and culture, often used to reflect on progress and the mechanics of our world. A textbook example is Giacomo Balla’s Futurist painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). Influenced by chronophotography—an early technique for capturing and understanding locomotion—Balla painted the legs of the dog and its walker multiple times, beautifully describing motion blur through repetition. A lesser-known example is from New Zealand-born photographer George Silk, who in the 1960s used a modified ‘strip’ camera to capture the human form as a fluid, amorphous shape, seemingly unconstrained by the laws of matter.
More recent examples are ever-present in popular music. In 2000, the hip hop group Three 6 Mafia brought widespread recognition to the ‘Chopped and Screwed’ subgenre, where songs are slowed to a low-pitched warp. Later in the decade, dubstep, which originated in the London club scene, became popular for its syncopated rhythms and long, drawling basslines that give the impression of a track being stretched and compressed.
So, what do these disparate reference points—studio pottery, Futurist painting, experimental photography, hip hop, and electronic dance music—have in common?
They all give aesthetic form to movement. They build a sense of plasticity from the successive, fleeting instances of a greater whole. In doing so, they encourage us to look more carefully at the material qualities of their building blocks. Kelly’s paintings are a meditation on place, but they are also more than this. Each consists of a limited, carefully chosen palette. While the mark-making is not pre-planned, he thinks carefully about the pigments, how they sit above and beneath one another, and the way light hits, penetrates, and reflects off them. In some instances, particularly where Kelly has scraped paint back to reveal the coloured gesso underpainting, the results look almost like lens flare, or the scattered light projected from the unfeeling, manufactured glass surfaces of the urban environment.
This mechanical quality stands in fascinating contrast to the work’s handmade nature. These paintings feel like they could only be made here and now. They are an argument for finding beauty not just by slowing down and immersing oneself in a pursuit, but by looking differently—finding wonder in the grooves of an object, and in the fleeting, artificial light of the modern
The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood. Prior to that, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal.
- John Berger, “Why look at animals?” in About Looking (UK: Vintage, 1992) 7
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Since we began painting, people have always depicted animals. Warm, pigmented viscera daubed onto the rocks at Lascaux, Bhimbetka, and Altamira—bison, deer, and boar, still visible up to 30,000 years later. Many of these earliest depictions are hunting scenes, possibly forms of hunting magic, part of rituals performed to ensure a bountiful hunt and a safe return. Totemic images of cats, wolves, and birds appear in Egyptian reliefs—animals held sacred, their godlike status conferred by bestowing animal heads upon human figures.
By medieval times, hunting scenes were rare, as they played little part in Christian legend, while totemic depictions were considered blasphemous. Instead, images of animals were symbolic, each one carrying a message, with many still resonant to this the lamb, a symbol of humility and a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice. Indeed, the symbolic role of animals was so significant that bestiaries—illustrated encyclopaedias of animals, real and imagined, usually accompanied by a moral lesson—became extremely popular, cementing the medieval Christian belief that every part of the natural world was a manifestation of God.
In Fief, Alex Mcfarlane paints decorative depictions of animals drawn from medieval art and architecture: a sombre winged wolf, an ambiguous curve of horns, a stylised dragon-like creature sprouting crucifixes from the tips of its strange head. Displaced from their own contexts—Mcfarlane’s source materials vary from illustrations in books and images found on Tumblr to her own photographs taken while travelling in Europe—oddly cropped and rendered in textures and hues far removed from their original forms of metal, wood, and salt, these creatures take on new qualities. Detached not only from their animality, these are creatures unmoored from time, their medieval mantle shaken loose, no longer bound to the metaphors originally ascribed to them.
This ambiguity is inspired, in part, by Aleksei German’s epic film, Hard To Be A God (2013). Despite being set on a far-off planet, German’s film appears to take place in the Middle Ages, for the Renaissance never occurred on the planet of Arkaner, dooming its human inhabitants to perpetual violence and squalor. For Mcfarlane, the film represents the past meeting the future, something that also seems to be occurring in our present day as billionaires, multinational corporations, and tech moguls gain seemingly absolute power, mirroring the dominion enjoyed by the lords and sovereigns of the Middle Ages.
John Berger writes that what distinguishes us from animals – our capacity for symbolic thought – is born of our relationship with them: we turn animals into symbols, into metaphors we then use to make sense of an uncertain world.[i] Animals were the first metaphor. As the past meets the future, it seems likely they will also be the last.
Alex McFarlane (b.1996, Ōtautahi / Christchurch) is a painter based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She graduated with a BFA (Hons) from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2018. Recent exhibitions include Extraordinary Contact (Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 2024), Nina's Dance and Tipping Rail (both Artspace Aotearoa, 2022) and Parakeets (Satchi&Satchi&Satchi, 2022). Her work has also been featured in publications such as Venomous Feathers and The Spinoff.
Text by Lucinda Bennett
In Blade Runner 2049, there is a scene where the protagonist takes a small wooden figurine to a vendor in a bustling marketplace. The vendor carefully examines it, using a machine to analyse its material structure in a manner reminiscent of how one might test a diamond. In the background, the sounds of voices and commotion from the street add to the atmosphere. After a tense moment, the vendor excitedly confirms that, yes, this figurine is extremely valuable—because it is made of real wood.
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The BladeRunner films are set in a dystopian future where Earth’s ecosystem has collapsed, and resources that were once plentiful have become scarce. There’s a sadness about the state this society has found itself in. At the same time, there is something intoxicating and beautiful about the hum of humans and machines that have overtaken the natural world.
Science fiction might seem a strange counterpoint for discussing the practice of a photographer like John Johns (1921–1999), but there is a thread to pull here.Johns was born in England and, once he’d returned from serving in the Royal AirForce during WWII, he joined the British Forestry Commission. In 1951, he immigrated to Aotearoa, where he joined the New Zealand Forest Service, initially working as a forestry worker. Thanks to his knowledge of forest management and expertise in photography, he later became the Forest Service’s first official photographer.
Later in life, Johns travelled to the United States twice to attend workshops with Ansel Adams, but apart from this, he was largely self-taught. His role in the Forest Service saw his work become widely published and gave him opportunities that were out of reach for most working photographers of his time. For instance, he formed a relationship with New Zealand Aerial Mapping Ltd., which led to him—along with instrument maker Geoffrey Hunter—being involved in the construction of an aerial camera, designed specifically for oblique aerial shots. This was the camera he used to make some of his most well-known images.
Johns’ soulful meditations on place and memory paved the way for descendants likeLawrence Aberhart and Mark Adams, and his use of shape and repetition was a precursor to some of Peter Peryer’s most iconic works. However, to the general public outside of the photographic community, his name is less well known than many of those who followed him. Along with Frank Hoffman, who emigrated to NewZealand from Europe, Johns is one of our most important modernist photographers. He was a technical virtuoso with a camera and in the darkroom, and there is something decidedly "form follows function" about the way he made images. Johns’ photos are documentation first and foremost; however, they are also explorations of line, rhythm, and balance.
Johns was a passionate environmentalist, and his photographs advocate for natural environments that need protection. At the same time, they also record the human relationship with the natural world in Aotearoa. Whether it is the fact that some photographs were taken from an aeroplane far above or that others feature rows of planted trees receding into the horizon, they speak to the delicate and precarious balance of sustainable living. That’s the interesting thing about his images: this tension is always there, always felt, even if it’s not pictured. A Johns image may depict a serene forest, but the whir of human progress is never far away.
This exhibition comprises photographs printed by Johns himself, which have been held in his family’s collection and have not been publicly displayed before. It features large prints of some of his most well-known images, as well as rarer, lesser-known works.
An evening preview for the exhibition will be held on Friday, 14 February, from 6–8pm.
Every artist recapitulates the history of art in their own manner. This process, however, is not an eclectic, grab bag, or random affair. Rather, it consists of constructing passages, relays and stopping points. These may relate to the different periods of the artist’s work, or they may consist of lifelong gestures toward and affinities with certain historical periods and the problems that survive these periods—certain themes and manners of the past that remain alive for the artist in the here and now. In this sense, particular geographical regions and their associated styles and lines of thought may retain fertile possibilities. The artist’s passages, relays and stopping points will often involve intense engagements with the work of another artist or school of art from the recent or distant past, including the associated philosophical, literary, political and scientific milieus within which they arose.
Many of my passages, relays and stopping points through the history of art are a recapitulation of the work on paper: watercolours, gouaches, drawings and collages, but I've found inspiration as well in mapping, kids’ book illustration, letter writing, architectural drafting, double entry bookkeeping manuscripts, cartooning and Japanese calligraphy, to name a few. On the technical plane, this has involved specific set-ups, materials and tools. Obviously paper as such, a concern for its vast history, its planetary travels from China to Europe via the Arab world, and today circulating absolutely everywhere. Paper has different textures, tones, hues, weights, rates of absorbency, etc. and all these different qualities interest me. But I have a fascination too for sable brushes, Chinese brushes, pencils and pens, conte and charcoal, rulers, set squares, stencils, French curves, drawing boards, certain types of paint and ink, and so on and so forth. And beyond the technical, my set-up also consists of singular items of clothing to be worn, certain stimulants to be used (or not), certain rooms, tables or landscapes to be occupied, particular times of the day and night in which I like to paint or draw, etc. and thus always there are rituals and rites. Making art is a kind of alchemy, but also a fetishism.
Unless one assembles and falls in love with certain materials and tools, certain assemblages of artistic erotica, as it were, then one is inclined to fall into an artistic void rather than projecting out across one. Today the work on paper is regarded as a minor form of artistic expression, not a major one, close to being a craft. After fifty years of an art-life, I’m happy to regard myself as a member of the Sunday Watercolour Circle.
—Ralph Paine, Notes for an Artist’s Talk
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Paine began exhibiting in the late 1970s. His history includes solo exhibitions with dealers such as Denis Cohn and Gregory Flint, along with a record of shows at culturally significant artist-led organisations including Teststrip, Artspace, South Island Arts Projects and Gambia Castle. He has also completed commissioned projects for many of Aotearoa’s major public institutions and has works in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Hocken Library, National Library of New Zealand and Te Papa Tongarewa.
