4 July 2024
What do a series of DIY modernist birdhouses, a perpetually spinning CD, and Minnie Dean’s unmarked grave have in common? They all feature in Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection.
City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, in its first show away from home, is celebrating the Chartwell Collection with a big, noisy group show of contemporary art made by Gen X artists.
Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection is a City Gallery Wellington exhibition shown at Te Papa and part of the Chartwell 50th Anniversary Project 2024. It runs from 27 July to 20 October and pays homage to 50 years of one of Aotearoa’s most significant contemporary art collections.
City Gallery Wellington Curator Megan Dunn says Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection, the biggest exhibition in the anniversary year, brings a different approach to looking at the Chartwell Collection.
“Rob Gardiner started the Chartwell Collection in 1974 in Hamilton, and it now contains some of the boldest and best contemporary art in the country. The collection itself is Gen X. Generation X are often considered the forgotten generation, coming after the Boomers but before the Millennials. Think Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, very world weary and disengaged but informed by popular culture, MTV and globalisation.”
More than that Megan says, the exhibition is personal. “This year is my fiftieth birthday too, so I wanted to showcase my generation, artists born between 1965 and 1980 and examine our legacy. “
The exhibition includes a diverse range of national and international artists from Damien Hirst to Kate Newby. The artworks, made during the nineties and early 2000s, span painting, sculpture, installation, sound and video. The show includes taxidermied bunnies from The Beverly Hills Gun Club by Michael Parekōwhai, while the dizzying pop-art floorwork The Sea by Andrew Barber is the centrepiece of a gallery that mimics ‘The Red Room’ from 90s cult television series Twin Peaks. The show also represents installation All the Things I Did by Richard Maloy, a document of his first to final year at art school and seen only once before it went into the Chartwell Collection.
“This is the only exhibition in the country where you can consider a series of used Pizza boxes as art. We’ve also created an audio guide speaking to many artists in the exhibition about their work, including Ann Shelton, Steve Carr, Yuk King Tan and Liz Maw. Pick up the landline phones on the walls and listen to artists talk in their own words.“
Gen X were the last generation raised in an analogue world and the show features a newly commissioned series of artworks on Post-it notes by Nick Austin, as the humble Post-it note was also a Generation X invention.
Co-Director of the Chartwell Collection, Sue Gardiner, says it didn’t occur to her that the Chartwell Collection was a member of the Gen X cohort until discussions about the show began.
“We were excited by this idea as it fitted with other ways we thought about the Collection as a whole. So maybe, thinking about art making occurring within the MTV generation, we could also add our own acronym – the CVT generation. After all, creative visual thinking, CVT, has been at the heart of Chartwell’s identity since its beginnings in 1974.”
Megan says, “The artworks in this celebratory show burn brightly like candles on a birthday cake. Don’t miss it.”
The show is supported by the Chartwell Trust and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi thanks partner institution Te Papa for its support as the gallery leaves home temporarily at the end of June, because of disruptive construction work in Te Ngākau Civic Square. City Gallery Wellington is working with arts whānau across the region to develop multi-partner opportunities to continue to bring significant exhibitions to Wellington until it returns home to a much-improved future-proofed building in 2026.