Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Last week, the government released the new curriculum subjects for students in years 11-13. New subjects such as politics, civics, philosophy, music technology, and media, journalism, and communications were included, but art history as a standalone subject has been quietly dropped – now to be incorporated into design, painting, photography and creative arts subjects.

The move has been widely criticised by art historians, academics, and past students, calling the decision both ‘devastating’ and ‘unsurprising’.

Sof spoke to the President of the New Zealand Art History Teachers Association, Dr Barbara Ormond, about the decision and the potential impact it will have on teaching the subject, both at the secondary and tertiary levels. 

Razzle Dazzle is a new exhibition showing a suite of previously unexhibited works from 2005-2006 by Martin Thompson, opening tonight at Charles Ninow Gallery. 

Martin Thompson (1956-2021) was a self-taught artist from the Wellington Region who became renowned for his abstract drawings. 

Although embodying these digital, post-internet, and almost early video game-like qualities, Thompson’s work was shaped and directed by fractals, which showed how simple mathematical rules can generate the complex structures we see in nature. 

The works in Razzle Dazzle show Thompson extending and upscaling his drawings beyond A3 and A4 graph paper, using a decidedly anti-digital approach with a Xerox machine, inviting an inspection of the works’ delicate complexities. 

Sof had a kōrero with Gallery Director and Curator Charles Ninow about Martin Thompson, his life, and practice.

The Future is an exhibition presenting new and recent work by Berlin-based artist Simon Denny, currently on at Michael Lett Gallery. 

In channelling the spirit of aeropainting and Italian Futurism, Denny employs contemporary methods of making with today’s technology to create two new series of paintings whereby both mechanical and painterly qualities transpire, aiding in a recontextualisation of 20th-century modernism. 

Sofia had a kōrero with Simon Denny about the show and his overall practice. 

Provenance III is a new group exhibition on at Ivan Anthony, the third of its exhibition series. Provenance brings together a collection of artists, emerging, established as well as European Antiquities. Pulling them together in space to create this rich cosmos of dialogue. A unique encounter between works that speak to this lineage of storytelling. 

Maya had a kōrero with two of the artists showing work within Provenance III  Sophie Grieg and Erika Holm. Speaking to them on their respective practices and works within the show. 

Sophie Grieg produces mesmerizing paintings that draw from the medieval, renaissance, illuminated manuscripts, as well as personal family narratives. Creating works enriched with intricate webs of fairy-tale-like fables, encased in these architectural framing devices. Housing these women of Greig’s practice, as well as their stories and lessons that they pass on. 

Erika Holm creates beautiful sculptures that are informed by items of furniture and house hold objects that demand this connection of body, and to an act of ritual. Holm takes these ritualistic objects and embeds their core structure with forms of the body. Re-attaching the body to these points of human connection that are held within the daily rituals of objects.