Megan Dunn is Curator Special Projects at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi.

Satan is much bigger than I thought. I gasped when I saw her taken out of the crate. The two exhibition installers, Robin and Ollie ushered Satan into the red room and put her down on a pair of chucks. Chucks are soft squishy blocks that we use to place artworks on before they are hung on the walls. The utmost care has been taken with Satan, a large oil painting made by the artist Liz Maw in 2003.

The painting is of a nude pinup model, holding a gun to her own head, her body is ghostly white, phosphorescent almost, but tinged blue. Her left hand is raised in the same gesture as the Virgin in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Annunciation in the Uffizi. Satan looks a bit like hell has frozen over.

For Liz Maw, she used Da Vinci’s hand, “as a NO gesture” and her symbolist painting Satan “…is ultimately defiant of everything women have ever done that’s not been okay by men throughout history, religion, mythology, society, politics.”

Art is always of a time and a place, just as Da Vinci’s The Annunciation is from the Italian renaissance, Satan is from the early noughties. The monumental painting is one of the unforgettable artworks in my exhibition Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection. I have hung Satan in a red room, that also features The Sea, a dizzying pop art floorwork by Andrew Barber. The Sea seems to rise in waves, producing an optical flicker.

Generation X offers a bold, speculative and wide-ranging view of the Chartwell Collection which started in 1974, coincidentally the year I was born. The Chartwell is one of Aotearoa’s largest and most important private collections of contemporary art and it is turning 50 years old this year — gulp, so am I. Gen X is the label used for the demographic of society born between the mid-60s and 1980. Turning 50 is a time to take stock, to look back and remember.

Once Generation X was counter cultural — think Slackers and Winona Ryder in Reality Bites — but we were also the last demographic raised in an analogue world. Obsolete technology is another theme. Feedback by Clinton Watkins is a moving image work of a CD spinning in slow motion, while Joe Sheehan’s Slide Show Carousel 2 is packed with slides made from pounamu. Who else remembers the slow click of the slide projector in the dark, the dust mites dancing in its funnel of light?

I could be accused of nostalgia — who knows, at 49 maybe I’ve earned that right — but the artworks in the exhibition are all by Gen X artists, produced in the 1990s and 2000s, they span every medium, and resist easy answers. The works include framed pizza boxes by Steve Carr and Evolutionary Revolutionary, a series of monkey masks covered in coloured tassels by sculptor Yuk King Tan. The tassels drip down in uniform colours, like barcodes, like Union Jacks. This is a retrospective show, but it is not sentimental. More quizzical and questioning — can art even define a generation?

I’ve interviewed several artists about their works and stashed these audio guides in old push button landline phones.

One artist I spoke to confessed he too was turning 50 this year. “It’s something,” he said shaking his head. “Yeah, it’s something,” I agreed.

I’ve also included Dane Mitchell’s sound work Gallery Mantra in the exhibition. The work is an audio of Dane himself reading out positive affirmations but for a gallery rather than a person. You are a confident, worthy capable gallery now,” Mitchell intones on Gallery Mantra. “You are a worthy gallery among many other worthy fellow galleries.”

Mitchell’s Gallery Mantra is a confidence boost and it is also true. Due to construction work, this is the first exhibition away from our building in Te Ngākau Square for City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. But Te Papa has generously made space to host our Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection on their fourth floor. Together we’re a strong, resilient sector committed to bringing art to you. That is our ‘gallery mantra.’

Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection is a City Gallery Wellington exhibition showing at Te Papa and part of the Chartwell 50th Anniversary Project 2024.

IMAGE Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, 2024. Photo: Cheska Brown.
IMAGE Yuk King Tan Evolutionary Revolutionary (detail) 2006, tassels on mask. Courtesy Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery o Tāmaki.
IMAGE Steve Carr Pizza Boxes 2014, 12 used pizza boxes inside custom frames. Courtesy Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery o Tāmaki.