Tauranga Art Gallery Toi Tauranga is delighted to announce the opening of Andrew Beck: Soft Filter and City of Tomorrow: Natalie Guy and Gavin Hipkins.
Andrew Beck: Soft Filter is a brand new commission created especially for the gallery’s atrium space by the Tauranga Moana-born, Te Whanganui-a-Tara based artist. Blending photography, painting, sculpture and installation, Soft Filter is inspired by influences as diverse as sci-fi movie The Matrix, the work of Surrealist artist Jean Cocteau and the musical genre Vaporwave. Visitors are presented with a large scale, immersive experience in which these formal and thematic elements are merged, encouraging slippage from one form to the next.
In the upstairs galleries, City of Tomorrow: Natalie Guy and Gavin Hipkins brings together the work of Tāmaki Makaurau-based photography and moving image artist Gavin Hipkins and Tauranga Moana-born, Tāmaki Makaurau-based sculptor Natalie Guy. Both explore the influence of modern architecture, a style of building that emphasises function and form over decoration. Artworks include Guy’s The Genius Loci of the Chapel 2020, a towering three-part sculpture inspired by the late Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, as well as Wellington’s Futuna Chapel and Hipkins’ moving image work City of Tomorrow 2017 that reflects on the symbolism of the planned city of Chandigarh, India.
Tauranga Art Gallery is also pleased present Hipkins’ epic photographic series The Homely II 2001-2017, toured by City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. A combination of strange-yet-familiar scenes shot entirely with an amateur film camera, The Homely II explores our differences and similarities with the United Kingdom in a 35-metre-long band of images formed from 80 individual photographs.
Tauranga Art Gallery Director Stephen Cleland says, “We’re excited to present this dynamic range of new exhibitions across both floors of our gallery. From Andrew Beck’s epic optical installation to the musings on the legacy of Le Corbusier in the work of Natalie Guy and Gavin Hipkins, this suite of shows reveal insightful and sometimes surprising interconnections around the themes of architecture, modernism and expanded approaches to photography”.
This suite of exhibitions is complemented by a free in-conversation event with all three artists at 11am on Saturday 4 June 2022, the opening day of the exhibition.
