Sydney Contemporary 2023 | Booth C02

Gow Langsford Gallery has built a reputation for bringing some of the finest art from Aotearoa to Sydney Contemporary. This year, the Auckland-based gallery will present new paintings by four of its represented artists: Grace Wright, Aiko Robinson, Chris Heaphy, and Dale Frank. In addition to this, a grouping of small works will be presented by sculptors including Virginia Leonard, Pablo Picasso, Tony Cragg, Paul Dibble and Lisa Roet. Perth-based Robinson is the most recent addition to the gallery's roster of represented artists. Her work is playfully explicit, delicately balancing historic influences with a contemporary aesthetic. Sydney Contemporary will be Gow Langsford's first significant showing of her nuanced and striking artwork.

Aiko Robinson
Aiko Robinson has developed an image-making practice that delicately balances historic influences with a contemporary aesthetic, creating work that is both richly nuanced and visually fresh. The studied craftsmanship of her work is immediately evident, effortlessly invoking traditional Japanese ukiyo-e art through fastidious detail and precisely structured compositions. The artist creates images that are playfully explicit, balancing the provocative with the everyday, the romantic with the humorous.

Robinson's work conceptually engages with shunga, a form of Japanese erotic art that was prevalent from the 1600s through to the 1800s. She also cites the work of Aubrey Beardsley as an influence. Beardsley was a British illustrator who worked in Paris in the late 1800s, and his work drew from Japanese woodblock printing, bringing aspects of that tradition into a Western context. Robinson responds to these historic sources, creating contemporary artworks that are visually rich and sensual, navigating themes of intimacy, consent, gender, and sexual politics. 

Robinson has created a new body of work for Sydney Contemporary, including two large-scale works on paper. She states that these works are a continuation of her practice of the past few years, with compositional and stylistic innovations rather than wholesale thematic changes. Though engaged with the erotic, they are more titillating than explicit. They are hand drawn, rendered in pen and paint on washi paper, though they carry underlying references to printmaking. With these works, Robinson presents a sophisticated artistic vision. She skilfully balances technical precision with cross-medium innovation, explicit content with a mirthful sense of style.

Chris Heaphy
Over a career spanning more than three decades, Chris Heaphy has created a substantial body of visually engaging artwork. His visually and conceptually layered paintings examine themes of time, place, and memory, often tapping into the dynamic interaction of diverse cultural perspectives. His earlier paintings were often comprised of unified images constructed from a kaleidoscopic array of smaller symbols. More recently, Heaphy's paintings have been comparatively pared back, employing a handful of recurrent motifs rather than the dazzling imagistic mosaic of his earlier work.

In this selection of new artworks, Heaphy employs a range of distinctive motifs - birds, feathers, urns - to create paintings that are both quietly reflective and powerfully symbolic. These motifs are set against layered backgrounds of abraded paintwork, setting up a striking visual contrast. To Heaphy, image and paintwork are physically and conceptually intertwined; the image is materially comprised of paint, and the conceptual meaning of the image is inseparable from how it has been painted. These works are dynamic and vibrantly colourful, yet they retain a sense of contemplative poise - a place of rest within a world of turbulence.

Heaphy is an artist of Māori and European descent, and themes of cultural identity are often present in his work. His paintings open up myriad possible interpretations, reflecting how they connect with various cultural perspectives. Heaphy has exhibited extensively throughout Australasia and Europe and his work is held in major public and private collections in New Zealand and other parts of the world. Gow Langsford Gallery has represented his work since 2008.

Grace Wright
Over the past three years, Grace Wright has taken the New Zealand art scene by storm. Her large-scale gestural abstract paintings have found a wide audience of admirers, and they have become increasingly sought-after by collectors.

Wright's paintings are entirely abstract, yet they can feel representational - an effect of her skilfully attuned palette and mark making. They often have a sense of visual depth, though do not achieve this through traditional techniques of perspective. Instead, Wright creates layers of abstract gestures with dazzling tonal and chromatic contrasts. The resulting layered visual field has a surreal, atmospheric quality that would be equally at home in either a historical painting or a fantasy videogame.

Wright has been based in Australia while producing work for Sydney Contemporary. This change in location has had an effect on her painting, as she has responded to a different quality of light and colours in the environment. This is most notable in her choice of palette - vivid blues, warmer than those encountered in New Zealand, along with notes of red and ochre echoing the colour of the earth. Wright observes that this as an instinctive process, indirect and connected to the place of production. The artist also has a background in music, and sees a relationship between composition and sound, likening painting gestures to musical notes. She cites Hans Zimmer's score for the movie Dune as a touchpoint in the creation of these artworks.