Ronnie van hout biography of abraham
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(Meanwhile his feral fellow-travellers, expressionist painters Allen Maddox and Philip Clairmont, never regained relevance or respectability.)
Laurence Aberhart was also anachronistic. Until his breakthrough works of the early 1990s, Hammond was a relatively marginal figure. He has been included in a number of survey exhibitions, including ‘The National: New Australian Art’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2017.
His work is held in all major public collections in New Zealand and Australia.
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He went on to produce mythological and allegorical paintings, often with themes of incarceration, featuring images of crypts, caves and cells.In the postmodernist 1980s, his fantasy life-of-the-artist became disreputable: no one wanted to know. One would have struggled to find enough artists to put together a decent show. The 1995 Sam-Neill-fronted doco Cinema of Unease, emphasising our national cinema’s dark side, is habitually cited. In the 1970s Fomison produced morbid paintings of outsiders and marginal types: the ill (including a malaria victim and a Sunnyside asylum patient); clowns, gurners and prisoners; and those exemplary sufferers, Christ (copied from the various Old Masters) and Van Gogh.
Quasi
In 2016, Ronnie van Hout installed his rudely pink, five-metre-high sculpture, Quasi, on the roof of Christchurch Art Gallery. In one photo, van Hout spelt out ‘The Living Dead’ in caps, cinemascope style, behind an open grave,as if from a movie’s opening titles. Hammond’s cartoonish paintings were junkie, punky, and dystopian, juiced-up with speed-freak violence, jumbled perspectives, and clashed codes.
His exaggerated Caravaggesque studies in darkness, with their rough Hessian grounds, found frames and copperplate-script inscriptions, looked like instant antiques. Alongside overtly relevant images (a model ship’s rigging, a mock-Maori gateway, a model lighthouse, mud pools), he included seeming obliquely connected or irrelevant images (a tyre swing, a takeaways menu, and a hooded jacket), their very out-of-placeness making them uncanny, spooky.6
While New Zealand Gothic is tied up with the postcolonial, not all the work is postcolonial Gothic.
No longer required, it came to haunt City Gallery’s roof on August 19, 2019. He said, 'a hand and a head placed together creates this other third thing ... Satirising the idea of the New Zealand landscape as a haunted space, a place of unfinished business, Van Hout at once buried McCahon and revealed a latent Gothic dimension in his work.
It featured 80 images of subjects which, according to Hipkins, were ‘used to define nationhood and historic folklore’. This seems to be a possible subtext in Play (2006), where Cotton inexplicably brings contemporary imagery—video-player button graphics—into the orbit of historical Maori imagery, as if these contemporary pointers might be operating under its spell.
Stoker’s novel is the classic gothic tale of a battle of wills between the dead and the living, the past and the modern, with a defunct aristocratic superstitious order praying on the brave new world of rationality, science and technology. Inspired, he imagined himself in Old New Zealand, before even the Maori had arrived, when birds were still on top.
Cross-referencing photography, colonial history and death, he has photographed New Zealand as if ‘the scene of a crime’. As Lita Barrie put it, Aberhart’s images ‘evoke the atmosphere of New Zealand’s colonial past as if experienced in the present … as a spectre’.5 Aberhart occasionally—but tellingly—mixed in contemporary subjects with bogan overtones, anticipating again 1990s New Zealand Gothic.
Cotton runs together found images in a speculative/experimental fashion, playing on rhymes and disjunctions between, for instance, nineteenth-century Maori imagery and nineteenth-century Christian imagery.