Fiona Pardington's exhibition Childish Things opened last night at Starkwhite (6-8pm) and runs to 22 September. Read more…

This link takes you to Claudia Arozqueta's review of our exhibition In Motion published by art-agenda.
Images: installation views of works by Alicia Frankovich, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy and Grant Stevens in the Starkwhite exhibition In Motion.  

Our exhibition In Motion continues this week and through to 8 August. You can read an insightful review of the show here.

Image: Noah Horowitz

Maria Lind has been appointed artistic director for the 2016 Gwangju Biennale. “I will make sure next year's Gwangju Biennale will be a place where artists, the public, people working in the art industry , and local residents gather to discuss, relate and communicate in the name of art,” Lind said during a precent press conference. The previous edition of Gwangju Biennale, curated by DIA Art Foundation director Jessica Morgan, was marked by controversy and led to the resignation of Biennale Foundation president Lee Yong-Woo.
Image: Maria Lind

John Reynolds' Epistomadologies opened at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki last night and runs to i November. Read more…
Images: from John Reynolds', Epistomadologies series 2001

Reparative Aesthetics: Rosangela Renno and Fiona Pardington is showing at the University of Sydney Art Gallery to 25 September. Curated by Sue Best, the show addresses the question: how do artists confront troubling national histories? Renno and Pardington are positioned as artists who have have pioneered a reparative approach to the representation of the colonized and disenfranchised.
Image: Fiona Pardington, Portrait of a life cast of Koe (front), Timor, 2011; Rosangela Renno Three Holes 1998, from the Vulgo series (Alias) 1998-99

Jin Jiangbo's interactive projection Rules of Nature was launched recently on Auckland's Dominion Road. The work is in the manner of Chinese ink and wash painting, presented as a video projection with software that allows it to respond to the movement of viewers on the street. Commissioned by the Auckland City Council and the Albert-Eden Local Board, the projection runs each night after dark at the New Zealand Chinese Bookshop, 672 Dominion Road, Mt Eden.
Images: stills from Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature (2015).

In Motion runs at Starkwhite this week and through to 8 August. The show includes work by Rebecca Baumann and Brendan Van Hek (AUS), Alicia Frankovich (DE), Len Lye (NZ) Laszlo Moholoy-Nagy (US) and Grant Stevens (AUS). Read more here…
Images (top to bottom): Rebecca Bauman & Brendan Van Hek, Untitled (2015), acrylic and aluminum; Alicia Frankovich, Becoming Public: Actor (2015), C-print & The Female has Undergone Several Manifestations (2015), curtain, ribbon, fan, cord, plug; Len Lye, A COLOUR BOX (1935), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,  Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Grey), (1930), film still; Grant Stevens, Particle Wave (2013), six lenticular panels. A COLOUR BOX(1935) is presented in In Motion courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation and the British Postal Museum and Archive, from material preserved by the BFI National Archive and made available by Nga Taonga Sound and Vision. The Len Lye Foundation also acknowledges the support of Technix Group Ltd. Ein Lichtspiel: schwartz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Grey)is presented in In Motion courtesy of the Moholy-Nagy Foundation.

Laith McGregor's exhibition Somewhere Anywhere closes at Starkwhite on Saturday, 3pm. You can read a review of the show here.
Image: Laith McGregor, Somewhere Anywhere, installation view

Billy Apple®: The Artist Has To Live Like Everybody Else closes at the Auckland Art Gallery this weekend with a performance. Jazz musician Nathan Haines leads a quartet assembled for a sound performance of the Billy Apple-Jonathan Besser score Quartet. The performance is in the gallery's North Atrium, 1-2pm, free admission.
Image: Billy Apple@, January 2012, acrylic on canvas, 800 x 800mm 

Martin Basher's exhibition A Guide to Benefits is showing at ANAT EBGI in Los Angeles from 13 June to 25 July.
Images: Installation views of A Guide to Benefits at ANAT EBGI, June 2015

This link takes you to a review of Billy Apple Sound Works at Te Uru, a satellite exhibition curated by Andrew Clifford and staged at the time of the Billy Apple® survey exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, which closes this weekend.
Image: installation view of Billy Apple Sound Works at Te Uru

Billy Apple and Alicia Frankovich are represented in Art as a Verb, which opened last night at Artspace, Sydney. Curated by Charlotte Day, Francis E Parker and Patrice Sharkey for Monash University of Art, the exhibition takes as its departure point the concept of art as action, presenting projects from the 1990s to the present challenge the traditional role of the artist and the site of the museum. What constitutes the work of an artists? How do the varying roles of artist (an instigator, facilitator, teacher, performer, consumer or visionary) for within broader society? And how does the museum support art forms that function beyond the art object?
Image: Alicia Frankovich, Not Yet Titled, 2014, stainless steel, Thera bands, drink bottle, shoe lace, 80 x 90 x 45 cm. Exhibition view, Kunstverein Hildeheim

On Saturday 6 June, the Mangare Arts Centre Nga Tohu o Uenuku presents Gavin Hipkins' feature length film Erewhon, which is based on the 1972 novel by Samuel Butler. The film's narrator Mia Blake and composer Rachel Shearer will deliver a live soundtrack and voice performance in conjunction with the screening which takes place from 1-2pm.

Erewhon: the Book of the Machines, which combines photographs from the film with a 26 minute film extract, is also showing at the Forrester Gallery, timed to coincide with Oamuaru's 2015 Steampunk festival.
Images: Gavin Hipkins Erewhon (Mountains), Erewhon (Planet) and Erewhon (Forest) 2014, archival pigment prints, 600 x 337mm  

Laith McGregor's exhibition Somewhere Anywhere opens at tonight Starkwhite, 6-8pm, and runs to 4 July 2015.
Image: Laith McGregor, Terry (2015), pencil on paper, 30 x 40 cm; installation view of Somewhere Anywhere, Starkwhite July 2015 

Seung Yul Oh's OnDo, a temporary public sculpture at Ballantyne's Park on Auckland's Dominion Road, which is known for its Asian restaurants. You can read a review of the piece here.

Len Lye's Wind Wand is a striking and much-loved feature of New Plymouth's coastal walkway, which also includes John Reynolds' Big Wave Territory. This work celebrates Taranaki's rich cultural landscape, directing passers by to various local and regional destinations – the Mountain, Paritutu Rock and Sugar Loaf Island, SPOT X and The Forgotten World Highway. Using Transit New Zealand's road design format and materials, the high reflection sign also provides cultural points of departure, including artistic legacies, such as the writing of celebrated author Ronald Hugh Morrieson and Len Lye's kinetic sculpture.

Visitors to the new Len Lye Centre and refurbished Govett-Brewster Art Gallery have another treat in store for them – New Plymouth's coastal walkway. Like many New Zealand cities, New Plymouth was cut off from its waterfront by a four-lane highway and railway line until a plan was hatched to buy up properties along the foreshore and create an elegantly landscaped walkway for local residents and visitors to the city. Created through a multi-disciplinary approach (urban design, landscape architecture, environmental heritage, public art and town planning) it is a brilliant example of how to create social space for residents and support other creative city agendas such as tourism. It's a must-see piece of social engineering.
Image: New Plymouth's coastal walkway offering views of the sea and back over the city to Mt Taranaki

The new Len Lye Centre will open in new Plymouth on 25 July alongside the refurbished Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. The complex will combine a museum of contemporary art with New Zealand's first institution dedicated to a single artist, the pioneer filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye. Designed by Patterson Associates, the new Centre features a mirror-finished, light-reflecting facade inspired by the movement of light in Lye's sculptures and films – a pitch-perfect research and exhibition centre for an artist who once said: “My work I think is going to be pretty good for the 21st century.”
Image: Len  Lye Centre designed by Patterson Associates, Auckland

As the exhibition Rebecca Baumann + Brendan van Hek: Colour Restraint draws to and end at Campbelltown Arts Centre, the Museum of Contemporary Art has announced that Baumann will curate the next MCA Art Bar which takes place during VIVID, Sydney’s festival of light, music and ideas. Working with a collective of artists, Baumann has also created a new work for VIVID that will transform the MCA facade into a series of sound and colour ‘machines’ that create a continuously morphing listening and viewing experience. We will report on the Art Bar and Festival later this month.

We are delighted to announce the representation of three artists – Laith McGregor (AUS), Fiona Pardington (NZ) and Yuk King Tan (HK). McGregor will stage his first solo show with us in May, followed by Pardington in June and Tan in 2016. We will profile each of the artists in advance of their shows, but in the meantime go to our website for images of their work
Image: Laith McGregor, AIAIG, 2014, pencil on paper (top); Fiona Pardington, Mokosoi/Ylang Ylang, Fiji, 2014, pigment ink on Hahnemuhle photo rag; Yuk King Tan, The Beautiful Game, 2008, mixed media and firecrackers, installation detail

A number of Billy Apple satellite shows are being presented in Auckland, timed to coincide with the survey exhibition Billy Apple®: The Artist Has To Live Like Everybody Else at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. 

First up was SUCK, the first section of a two-part exhibition, Poetry in Motion, curated by Artspace director Misal Adnan Yildiz. Featuring a Suck sculpture and four small off-set lithographs on canvas of men with erections, perfectly centered on each wall, the exhibition transitioned into Poetry in Motion, a group show with with a lineup of artists including Billy Apple®, Art & Language, Bruce Barber, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler and Laurence Weiner. This link takes you to a review of SUCK.

The Artspace show was followed by BILLY APPLE SOUND WORKS at Te Uru which gathers together, for the first time, sound works produced by Apple in collaboration with composers such as Jonathan Besser, Annea Lockwood, John Osborne and Nam June Paik.

Around the same time, Starkwhite launched its contribution to the city-wide satellite shows. Curated by Mary Morrison, TOTEM presents Billy Apple alongside Arnold Manaaki Wilson. Using the golden ratio the artist has divided the two columns in Starkwhite into artist's cut and dealers's cut. Starkwhite's share is white and remains part of the gallery architecture, and Apple demonstrates his share by painting it yellow, like a 3-D bar graph. Arnold Wilson is represented with three pou whenua of maori ancestral figures – Haumia, the god of wild, uncultivated things and her children Rangitiina and Tiniia. Grouped together they signify regeneration, emphasising the need to take care of nature's ecosystems.

You can read the curators rationale for the juxtaposition of the two artists here.
Image: Billy Apple SUCK, installation view, Artspace (top); artwork for SOUND WORKS at Te Uru (middle);  TOTEM, installation view, Starkwhite (bottom)

The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki is currently showing Billy Apple®: The Artist Has To Live Like Everybody Else, an exhibition surveying work produced during a career spanning over 50 years.

Billy Apple was 'born' in London in 1962, the same year he graduated from the Royal College of Art, when the 26 year old artist changed his name and bleached his hair. By reinventing himself, Apple sought to establish a new relationship between the the artist and everyday life by exploring how he could be redefined as a 'product' with his own distinct brand. 

His commitment to testing the boundaries between art and life continue to this day. In 2007 Billy Apple® registered his name as a trademark. He is now involved in various projects that explore the legal concept of intellectual property by bringing his art brand into the market place. As Apple says, he is a brand looking for product and the survy show includes recent examples of this move, such as his Billy Apple Cider produced through a collaboration with Saatchi & Saatchi's Derek Lockwood.

Apple's contributions to the history of pop and conceptual art have been recognised internationally, with a major two-part survey at Rotterdam's Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in 2009, curated by Nicholaus Schafhausen. He is also represented in the Walker Art Centre's forthcoming survey of pop art opening in Minneapolis in 2016. 

Curated by Christina Barton, Billy Apple®: The Artist Has To Live Like Everybody Else runs to 21 June 2015. 
Image: Billy Apple (above), Billy Apple Cider (middle) and Billy Apple Art Free for the Taking, 2015 (below), a free multiple which is being snapped up by visitors to the the exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery 

Martin Basher's Jizzy Velvet continues this week at Starkwhite, through to 7 March 2015.
Images: installation views of Martin basher's Jizzy Velvet.

Image: Michael Smythe's design for a New Zealand flag based on Gordon Walters' koru paintings.

Image: David Hatcher's Waitangi, First Article, English (as signed), 2004.

Adeline Ooi is the new director of Art Basel Hong Kong, replacing outgoing director Magnus Renfrew. Formerly the head of Art Basel's VIP Relations for S E Asia, she takes up her new position in January, two months out from the third edition of Art Basel Hong Kong. Read more…
Image: Adeline Ooi, director of Art Basel Hong Kong

All the best for 2015 from the team at Starkwhite.

Starkwhite is closed for the summer holiday period re-opening on 13 January and by appointment from the 5th. Our first show in 2015 is by Martin Basher.

Tonight we launch a new Inhouse designed publication by John Reynolds, with writing by Laurence Simmons seeking to unravel some of the mysteries of blueness. 

Simmons says: “Blue is as moody as we all are. It can almost mean anything. The colour of vibrant skies; the undisputed colour of heaven, but also of the cold, bruised skin of death. It is the signature of plainness in blue denim jeans, the peasantry in the Mao suit of communism, the law in police uniforms, the earnestness of bluestockings, the sign of the Virgin Mary and even John Key. Of course, the bluest blues have always been found in painting: it was lapis lazuli, the vivid blue rock from Afghanistan, that lit up Renaissance Italian painting becoming the signature shade of the Virgin Mary’s mantle; and Yves Klein’s International Klein blue that bound the pigment to the canvas for a bluer blue, at once more material and more abstract. With ‘Blutopia’ John continues that long tradition of painting in his boisterous exploration of the associations and hues of blue. He exquisitely teases out the contradictions of blue, its mercurial nature. For blue is the colour that both reassures and intimidates us. As Derek Jarman in his last film, made shortly before his death from AIDS, declared 'blue is an open door to the soul, an infinite possibility of becoming tangible'”.

We have joined the Instagram set and you can follow us at instagram.com/starkwhite where you will find this image featuring as our latest post – our place photographed by Shanghai-based artist Jin Jiangbo (making the familiar strangely unfamiliar).

Instagram as an artistic medium was the subject of one of the sessions in this year's Art Basel Miami Beach Talks programme, featuring four panelists with a combined 1.6 million followers. Amalia Ulman took the stage first, describing how she had created a fictional online narrative around the character who appears in selfies on the amaliaulman Instagram feed. Simon de Pury was next up saying he uses the service to catalogue pieces and items that he finds beautiful, followed by Hans Ulrich Obrist who talked about his handwriting project, a massive series where artists and cultural figures write short phrases on post it notes for his Instagram feed. Klaus Biesenbach then explained how Instagram helped him get over his aversion to revealing anything about himself, and co-founder of Instagram Kein Systrom wrapped up the session saying “our mission is to capture all the world's moments, but our core value is to inspire creativity.”
Image: James Franco's post-it note for Hans Ulrich Obrists' The Handwriting Project.

At the opening of the first show by new director Adnan Yildiz (tomorrow at 6pm), Artspace will present  a contribution from Billy Apple towards Artists for Kobane, a global benefit auction organised by Hito Steyerl and Anton Vidokle in solidarity with refugees from Kobane, Shengal and many other towns and areas in northern Syria and Iraq who have been displaced by IS attacks and provisionally sheltered in museums, construction sites or tents. Proceeds from this auction will go towards providing tents, winter clothes, electric stoves, blankets and diapers mainly to the municipality of Suruc, where around 50,000 refugees from Kobane live.
Images: Billy Apple, Art For Kobane, 2014, 382 x 618 x 25mm, UV impregnated ink on canvas; Billy Apple, Basic Needs, 2014,  618 x 382 x 25 mm, UV impregnated ink on canvas