Melvin Day - Piano Accordian, 1955. Oil on panel. Collection of Waikato Museum te Whare Taonga o Waikato.
Experience art that pushes boundaries and create a bit of mischief or track the lifelong art journey of a modernist art icon at Pātaka this summer.
Mischief Makers
27 Nov ‘21 – 6 Feb ‘22
Mischief Makers celebrates the playful and disruptive side of Māori and Moana arts.
The artists in this exhibition are consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through loopholes and outwitting the confines of ideas.
Humour, observation and dualities are their main tools. With serious play, the artists demonstrate a curiosity and appetite that tests the boundaries of the world, and, sometimes, the gallery!
Featuring work by Danny Butt, Hemi Macgregor and Natalie Robertson, Jessicoco Hansell, Turumeke Harrington, Janet Lilo, Elisabeth Pointon and Christopher Ulutupu, Suzanne Tamaki, and Layne Waerea.
Melvin Day: A Modernist Perspective
28 Nov ‘21 – 8 Feb ‘22
This exhibition showcases works of Melvin Day, a leading figure in mid-20th century New Zealand art.
It begins with some of his earliest surviving works from his teenage years in the 1930s and concludes with a large modernist landscape of Fiordland, painted in 2016.
During his career he produced some of the most intellectually astute, yet often visceral, paintings in New Zealand art history. Born in Hamilton in 1923, Day was a radical painter, particularly in his youth, but also a great believer in tradition.
In recent years, his early Cubist-inclined paintings have reinstated him – alongside John Weeks, and Louise Henderson – as a key figure in mid-20th century New Zealand art.
His early explorations of cubism in the 1950s laid the foundations for modernist abstractions of the 70s and underpin the monumental faceted landscapes of the 80s for which he became best known.
24 Nov 2021
