Selected Recent Exhibitions
“Where Light Lies”
Page Galleries
Wellington
July 18 – August 10, 2024
Page Galleries
42 Victoria Street
Wellington 6011
New Zealand
info@pagegalleries.nz.co
+ 64 4 471 2636
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For Max Gimblett the studio has always been where the light lies. Featuring an arresting suite of recent paintings, this exhibitionis testimony to the artist’s ceaseless pursuit towards enlightenment and a longstanding desire to articulate truth and humanity through his practice.
While ‘light’ is often emblematic of hope, where light lies, so too does its counterpart of darkness, those twin tenets governing humanity, religion, and spirituality. Now eighty-eight years old, Gimblett has continuously endeavoured to hold both in conscious synergy. Where Light Lies might also, in a playful equivocation, refer to those illusory qualities of light and the application of paint to canvas, and the potential for each to either illuminate or conceal.
Max Gimblett (b.1935, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau) has been primarily based in New York since 1972. His practice encompasses a complex synthesis of influences as varied as Abstract Expressionism, Modernism, Eastern and Western spirituality, Jungian psychology, and ancient cultures. Gimblett explores the multiplicity of meaning attached to revered objects and symbols, particularly the quatrefoil, which dates to pre-Christian times and is found in both Western and Eastern religions through forms such as the rose window, mandala, cross, and lotus. Gimblett steps further into the realm of the sacred with his use of precious metals; with gold and silver consistently associated with honour, wisdom, and enlightenment.
The Getty Research Institute Collection recently acquired an anthology of over 250 of Gimblett’s artist books — containing writings, drawings, collages, notes, quotes, and calculations — gifted by the artist and his wife, scholar, and curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. His work has been exhibited extensively and is held in significant public and private collections internationally and in Aotearoa. Major solo exhibitions include Ocean Wheel, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Christchurch (2020); The Art of Remembrance, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara (2016); The Word of God: The Sound of One Hand, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh USA (2011); and The Brush of All Things, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau (2004).
“Hands of Gold”
Gow Langsford Gallery
Auckland City
June 5-29, 2024
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
This depth of underlying philosophical thought opens up an array of interpretive possibilities. A viewer can engage with them as meditations on the human condition, as richly emotional works of expressionism, or as satisfying works of abstraction with a unique aesthetic. However one chooses to engage with Gimblett’s work, its quality is undeniable.
Gow Langsford is delighted to present Hands of Gold, an exhibition of new works by Max Gimblett. Hands of Gold features a stunning array of paintings, the majority of which take the quatrefoil shape – a hallmark of Gimblett’s oeuvre. While this essential form repeats, the treatment of surface varies considerably from work to work. There are evenly surfaced monochromes, grid-like patterns, and extravagantly gestural brush strokes in a rich array of colours. What shines through in this diverse range of approaches to painting is the quality of Gimblett’s craft and his distinctive artistic vision.
“The Alchemist”
Max Gimblett
Bienvenu Steinberg & J
New York
May 23 - June 23, 2024
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Bienvenu Steinberg & J is honored to present The Alchemist, a show of recent paintings by Max Gimblett. The exhibition’s focus is on the 88-year-old artist’s iconic quatrefoil canvases that are noteworthy both for the spiritual universality of their form and for their sumptuous use of color, light, and precious metals. In a text addressed to the artist, Lewis Hyde, scholar and essayist, writes, “You take gold to be a sign of consciousness, of alchemical transformation, of the precious and sublime…The precious metal in your work is to be understood spiritually, not literally; it bespeaks the promise of psychic transformation and healing. It is a joining of opposites.”
The Alchemist is the artist’s first solo appearance in New York in more than a decade. Born in New Zealand in 1935, Gimblett traveled extensively before settling in New York in 1972. His work draws on a broad range of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual traditions that overarch the divisions between East and West. Beginning in 1983, and continuing today, Gimblett’s practice deploys the gestural dynamics of both Abstract Expressionism and Zen calligraphy onto richly layered and endlessly diverse metallic quatrefoil surfaces. While continuing to create paintings in a broad range of formats Max Gimblett’s evocation of the quatrefoil as a signifier of spirituality calls to mind the symbol’s presence in myriad cultures ranging from Buddhist mandalas to Christian rose windows. According to Chris Saines, Director of the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, “A Gimblett quatrefoil makes a contemporary object of that historic space then shifts its meaning at the surface, searching for the particular in the face of the universal.”
Max Gimblett is a painter, calligrapher, and Rinzai Zen monk. Gimblett’s paintings are a harmonious postmodern synthesis of American and Japanese art. Often working on shaped panels or canvases – tondos, ovals, and his signature four-lobed quatrefoil – he marries Abstract Expressionism, Modernism and Spiritual Abstraction with mysticism and traditions of Asian calligraphy. Masterful brushwork, an eccentric and sophisticated color sense and sensuously lush surfaces are punctuated with gilding in precious metals – a nod to alchemy, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland (in which he was raised) and Japanese lacquerware, ceramics and temple art.
Born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1935, Max Gimblett studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1960s and has since traveled, taught and exhibited extensively across the globe. Gimblett’s work is included in major museum collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki.