From Here on the Ground brings together over six decades of contemporary painting in Aotearoa, predominantly from the 1920s to 1960s, its attention on both prominent and lesser-known painters, all focusing their attention on the industrial and urban environment of our cities and towns.  

As a group exhibition,   From Here on the Ground is a welcome reconsideration of a history of 20^th century Western Art painting traditions in Aotearoa that largely avoids landscape as a subject of interest.  (Rita Angus’ Cass, 1936 is featured, but her well-known landscape seems present as a stage for the transformative industrial activity of her painting that directs our attention to its railway station, power-lines, buildings and shed.)  Indeed, curator, Ken Hall‘s selection of paintings  seem  to be an invitation for all to reappraise contemporary 20^th century painting in Aotearoa, directing our attention to its developing cities, towns, factories and suburbs.   

Among the artists in From Here on the Ground, is Doris Lusk, represented by two paintings that are among her most admired works.  A resident in Linwood, Lusk’s The Pumping Station, and City Gasworks, (both from 1958), are highlights, their subjects close to her home in Gloucester Street, their presence as an art meets-daily-life encounter making them as accessible as they are comprehensively sincere.  

And such an experience is by no means limited to Lusk.  Among the less familiar and worth discovering, (on loan from the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki ) is Buster Black’s, (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Rangi), City at Night. C. 1962, and other less familiar artists that include Rose Zeller, (1891 – 1975), represented by an untitled painting of Te Tai Poutina West Coast coal mine, Charming Creek in Westport.   Zeller’s expressionist paintings had few, if any, local precedents at this time, possibly only Maud Sherwood’s (1880 – 1956), painterly watercolours, seemingly related to Zeller’s work.

W. A. Sutton’s (1917- 2000), Glenmore Brickyard, 1942, is also a surprising work.  Completed during his time as a camouflage artist, 1941 – 1945, when he was concealing the locations of local ‘bomb stores and airfields,’ his painting, Glenmore Brickyard, in its abstraction of its subject is a work by Sutton that is coincidentally, comparable to figurative/abstract American artist Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings at this time, and his celebrated series, The Berkeley Years, 1953 – 1966.   It is only speculation, but it is impossible not to think what might have been if the South Island-based Sutton had pursued the American artist’s figure/ground relationships through his own painting over as many decades – if only.

DETAILS
From Here on the Ground, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Cnr Worcester Blvd and Montreal St, 18 May – 17 November

IMAGE

Rose Zeller, Untitled, c. 1925, oil on canvas.  Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, presented by Henry Maitland Tomlinson, 1975