Peter Gibson Smith: 31 Years Survey 1984 - 2014
11 November, 2014 - 18 January, 2015
Main Galleries
Peter Gibson Smith, Seed Head (2013), egg tempera on cut gesso construction
The Arts Trust celebrates 30 years since the first work by Auckland artist Peter Gibson Smith was acquired by the Trust’s growing collection of contemporary New Zealand art. The expansive vision, imaginative power, and technical virtuosity of Peter Gibson Smith are revealed in this colourful survey of three decades of the artist’s sustained development.
In 1984 Gibson Smith (b. 1961) had recently emerged from Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts. With few galleries willing to show young artists, Gibson Smith organised his own first exhibition in a vacant building in downtown Auckland. Recognising a significant new talent, the Trust acquired a work, Untitled (Two Tango). Thus began an intensely productive artist-collector relationship, resulting in many further acquisitions and commissions. Today the Collection holds 40 works by Peter Gibson Smith, covering more than 30 years of his practice as one of New Zealand’s most exciting contemporary artists. Featuring many of the huge, allegorical, fantastically detailed works for which the artist is famous, such as Rotomahana Rent (2011), the survey also showcases his frequent excursions into three-dimensional constructions, of which Superman (2013) is a stunning example.
As both a fastidious craftsman, obsessed with process, and a conjuror of bewitching, beguiling images, Gibson Smith draws from a vast frame of art historical and literary reference. The production of images, and their replication and transmission across space, time, and cultural boundaries, remain primary interests in Gibson Smith’s considerable oeuvre and practice. He delights in both the mechanical and the conceptual aspects of reproduction. From mastering the alchemy of ancient painterly technologies such as egg tempera and gesso, to testing the artistic possibilities of contemporary electronic reprographics, Gibson Smith is always completely immersed in the materials from which he constructs his dreamlike alternative realities. He is especially fascinated with the idea of wringing further uses from recent technologies that are already on the verge of redundancy, like facsimile machines and mechanical graph plotters, as the pace of technological change becomes ever more rapid. In whatever medium and method he chooses, Gibson Smith’s skill as a draughtsman and his deep interest in the act of drawing are always evident. Thematically, his technical discipline and skills exist as a logical extension of his interest in expressing the human condition, often through the images of human figures that recur often in his works.
Tracing Gibson Smith’s intense preoccupation with the relationship between two and three dimensions, the survey exhibition includes many of the gigantic, classically-themed works on paper with which Gibson Smith earned national recognition in the 1990s, as well as large-scale painted constructions in wood and tempera based on book titles, and recent multi-faceted, three-dimensional figures made from computer-generated, geometrically composed paper forms. The 30 year survey reveals how this tireless and inventive experimenter has achieved mastery of his materials and messages at every stage of innovation. Equally evident are the beguiling masks of subtle, self-effacing humour that Gibson Smith uses to conceal his prodigious skills, seducing the viewer into memorable engagements with his imaginative world.