30 June – 13 September
Ground floor galleries
For all that Pete Wheeler has never shied away from the big existential issues – sex, death, politics, religion, and indeed he brazenly wrestles it onto his canvas as his subject matter – first and foremost it’s about his love for the materiality of paint. The most dramatic or kitschiest imagery takes a back seat to getting pigment down on a surface in a diversity of techniques, gestures, expressions, and a contradictory, evocative palette that manages to be both lurid and muddy. He is a painter’s painter whose trajectory has taken him from the gothic slacker grunge of the South Island’s art scene, to Berlin where he drank deeply of the echoes and decadent late phase of German post-war neo-expressionist painting. Pete Wheeler: Painting out of Time is an overview of the artist’s work from 2004 to 2019 from the Arts House Trust Collection.
Wheeler was born in Timaru, a place that has produced many artists who sought to escape its constraints, from Colin McCahon to Jason Greig. His art studies began in earnest in Dunedin at the Dunedin Polytechnic School of Art, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2000. There he was exposed to the work of the wave of ironic new history painting, the so-called ‘Pencilcase Painters’ that emerged from the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts – Peter Robinson, Shane Cotton, and Tony de Latour, and Bill Hammond who was a kind of older doyen to that group. In his second year Wheeler was introduced to the work of Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Clyfford Still, and Imants Tillers, though it was mainly the American Still and the Germans who left an impact. In his fourth year he discovered Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Wheeler is very much of what you might call the Vitamin P generation – that is to say, like many young artists in New Zealand at the arse end of the world at the time, much of his exposure to contemporary art in the broader world came via Barry Schwabsky’s cornerstone publication Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press, 2002), particularly rich in Leipzig School painters. From 2001 to 2006, Wheeler was synthesising these heterogeneous styles and contexts into a mulch that would nourish his own practice before taking off to Germany for his first Berlin stint in 2007–08. He returned in New Zealand in 2009 to dash off a yearlong MFA at Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts, back to Berlin, and temporarily back in New Zealand.
The Arts House Trust collection has been acquiring Wheeler’s works since the artist’s first Auckland exhibition, I Went Looking for One Good Man at Whitespace in 2004. Each Wheeler painting is a palimpsest of layers, of vestigial pentimenti and graffiti-esque overpainting with eclectically sourced imagery ranging from National Geographic-type photographs, to horror films, to art history, suspended between the skins of paint like the amulets in the bandages of an Egyptian mummy being slowly unwrapped by archaeologists. It takes time for the eye to take it all in and digest. Comparisons can be made to the equally atmospheric paintings of Peter Doig in the way they seem poised in a dreamlike, aesthetic longueur frozen in the moment just before something happens.
Often Wheeler’s paintings suggest the ambivalence or scepticism about painting’s contract with the real that Marcel Duchamp expressed all the way back in 1912 – the presence of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) in Wheeler’s recent paintings is not merely an art-historical pun on his own name. Living in Berlin and exposure to the work of Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, Arnulf Rainer, Gerhard Richter, Jörg Immendorff (a figure with a sketchy relationship to New Zealand art from his three month stint as Auckland Art Gallery's foreign-artist-in-residence in 1987-88), brought this to the fore.
The problem of the relationship between painting, performance, reality and tradition has, since the Second World War, always been most acute in Germany. Theodor Adorno’s precept that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is obscene” applies just as well to figurative and picturesque idealism in painting as in metrical verse, and Wheeler is asking a similar question: how can figurative painting continue to negotiate past the karma of its psychotic break with academic historicism and aestheticized politics while still acknowledging its self-soiling complicity in beauty betraying truth, and truth, beauty? To paraphrase James Joyce, art history is the nightmare from which he struggles to awaken.
Andrew Paul Wood, 2020.
