ArtBeat
The Central Art Gallery opened in The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora in 2017 in the former University of Canterbury’s library. Founding owners, Richard Laing (Director) and Jonathan Smart (Co-Director), opened the gallery with Smart responding to a proposal from Laing and their longstanding friendship ‘forged over fly-fishing and cricket’.
Establishing the Jonathan Smart Gallery in 1988, Smart brought his 30 year commitment to contemporary arts practice to The Central, co-founding the new gallery conscious of the necessity for a contemporary arts space that acknowledged the Arts Centre’s history and its commitment as a public facility for cultural/ educational groups and organisations.
For the visual arts, this encompassed its long-standing commitment to galleries that brought new perspectives and agendas to their programmes. In 1980, this had included printmaker Julie Einhorn’s The Gingko and in 1982, performance and environmental works in the Arts Centre’s public spaces that included Morgan Jones’ Shelter and Di ffrench’s performance Fontanel, as well as sculptor, Neil Dawson’s Echo—a suspended ‘floating’ sculpture commissioned in 1981, initially a temporary work that was confirmed as permanent in 1991. (Following the 2011 earthquakes and a period of absence it was reinstated in December 2021). In 2024, Dawson is represented by The Central sharing the gallery’s spaces with an impressive line up of artists that also include Elizabeth Thomson, Karl Maughan and Reuben Paterson.
In 2022, The Central celebrated its 5th anniversary with a group exhibition and among the inventory was Michel Tuffery, an artist whose practice had become publicly visible in 1999 as the Arts Centre’s Artist-in-Residence, staging a dramatic bullfight between two life-size bull sculptures, his representation by The Central in 2024 also sustaining an association with The Arts Centre, now encompassing 25 years of the artist’s practice.
DETAILS
The Central Art Gallery
The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora
2 Worcester Boulevard
Wed – Sun 10am – 4pm
IMAGE
1. Michel-Tuffery, Project Our Aiga Samoa, digital print, Non-solvent UV Ink on Rosapina white 220 sgsm cotton paper, 640 x 450mm unframed, Ed. 4 of 19