New Zealand at the Venice Biennale 2009

From 26 February 2010, the two New Zealand projects from the Venice Biennale 2009 will be on display in the contemporary segment of Toi Te Papa Art of the Nation.  

The exhibition will feature Judy Millar’s Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, curated by Leonhard Emmerling (St Paul Street Gallery, Auckland), and Francis Upritchard’s Save Yourself, curated by Heather Galbraith (City Gallery, Wellington) and Francesco Manacorda (Barbican Art Gallery, London). Visitors will have the opportunity to watch virtual tours of the works in situ in Venice, while experiencing the art in a contrasting gallery space.  

Judy Millar’s Giraffe-Bottle-Gun features enlarged paintings printed on billboard vinyl fitted onto shaped stretchers. In Venice, the works were displayed in the neo-classical circular church La Maddalena. The artist responded to this site and to the historical and cultural background of Venice by creating towering canvases that direct the view and the movement in the space. The works fill the space, playing with scale. Like Millar’s recent practice, they challenge the viewer’s relationship to the works as paintings.

Francis Upritchard, Save Yourself, 2009
Upritchard’s Save Yourself is an installation of idiosyncratic figures, lamps, and painted tree stumps on specially made tables. The installation forms surreal groupings of dancers, dreamers, and searchers lost in their own reveries. Upritchard’s works were displayed in the chambers of the neo-Palladian Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana, overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. The artist placed the tables against the rooms’ antique mirrors, which reflected the strange tableaux.

In Venice, both artists’ projects responded directly to their sites, the ornate interiors, and the existing artworks that are characteristic of Biennale venues. At Te Papa, the works will be viewed quite differently. They will transform, and be transformed by, their placement within the high stud Level 5 gallery spaces.