Henry Symonds: The Piano Lesson/Considered and Abandoned
5 August, 2014 - 28 September, 2014
Master Bedroom
The Piano Lesson / Considered and Abandoned features works by Henry Symonds, produced in response to Henri Matisse’s Piano Lesson (1916). Symonds work centers on an ongoing process of interlocution, a visual dialogue of ‘speaking between’.
In this instance the dialogue is an extended conversation with Matisse’s Piano Lesson, painted in the summer of 1916 while the Battle of the Somme, one of the darkest moments of the First World War raged not too far away.
The contrast between the measured, poised, serene interior space speaking of quiet domesticity and the ghastly chaos and horror of battle – geographically contiguous but dramatically removed in terms of lived experience has always fascinated and unsettled me.
Henry Symonds, 2014
A residency in New York in 2011 allowed Symonds to reacquaint himself with the Piano Lesson in the Museum of Modern Art over a period of several months and on returning to his studio in Auckland he embarked upon a reconsideration of the work. The process eventually resulted in the suite of six large works painted in a loose, interrelated sequence referencing his own domestic space, much as Matisse’s painting had referenced his.
Artist’s Biography
Henry Symonds, The Piano Lesson Considered (2010-2011), Acrylic on canvas
Henry Symonds is an artist and educator. He has exhibited internationally for many years and is represented in public and corporate collections in South Africa, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. He is represented in a number of private collections in South Africa, New Zealand, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands and Turkey. Born in South Africa he has been resident in New Zealand for twenty two years. He is currently Dean of Instruction and Undergraduate Studies at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design. Outside of his studio practice and his teaching and postgraduate supervision, his research interests include discourses around identity within the specific ambit of diasporic, immigrant and postcolonial settler cultures.