Cinema & Painting

11 February – 11 May 2014

Cinema & Painting examines the intersection of these two screen-based arts against the backdrop of a culture characterized by the increasing plasticity of pictorial surfaces and flexibility of spaces of viewing. Turning to artists, both contemporary and historical, who engage the relation between the screen and the space that projects from it, the exhibition maps the genealogy and continuing life of a Modernist tradition of depth.

Over three thematic suites, this exhibition’s volumetric cinemas and paintings that spill off the wall offer exemplars of a strain of aesthetic practice in which the interrogation of a haptic surface accompanies a commitment to the formal complexity of images. By addressing the materiality of projective space—that physical zone beyond the picture plane activated by the body of the spectator in conjunction with the beam of the projector or the intricacies of painted forms—Cinema & Painting examines the interconnection of these arts not only in pictorial but in explicitly phenomenological terms.

with Jim Davis, Oskar Fischinger, William Fox, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Lumière Company, Len Lye, Colin McCahon, Anthony McCall, Judy Millar, Matt Saunders, Phil Solomon, Diana Thater

screening Nathaniel Dorsky, Heinrich Hauser, Ken Jacobs, Lucien Rizos

Curated by Michelle Menzies and Daniel Morgan
 
 
See associated cinema events and talks in the Cinema & Painting Public Programme [PDF]

Download the booklet guide to Cinema & Painting here. The full exhibition catalogue will be published in May 2014.
 
 
Martin Rumsby performed Hollis Frampton’s A LECTURE (1968) during the exhibition opening on Tuesday 11 February at 7pm.

The exhibition was opened by Roger Horrocks, biographer of Len Lye and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland.
 
 
Generously supported by Creative New Zealand, Goethe-Institut New Zealand, The Embassy of France in New Zealand, The New Zealand Film Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua

Video: Phil Solomon, excerpt from American Falls, 2000-2012. Digital video, altered archival footage, colour, 5.1 and stereo sound, 55mins. Commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the artist.

Download the Cinema & Painting poster here.