Join us to celebrate the opening of City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi’s new exhibition Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection and hear artists Nick Austin, Andrew Barber, Ruth Cleland, Richard Maloy, Ann Shelton and Clinton Watkins discuss their artworks in the exhibition with curator Megan Dunn, and reflect on the legacy of being Gen X.
Curator Megan Dunn asked the artists to share a childhood photograph to enhance the retrospective nature of this exhibition. And for fun.
Nick Austin
Nick Austin was born in Whangārei in 1979. He received a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2004. He has exhibited throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and in Australia, United States and Europe. In 2012 he was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago in Dunedin, where he now lives.
Andrew Barber
Andrew Barber (b. 1978) is a New Zealand artist born in Tamaki Makarau, Auckland and now based in the Coromandel. He has exhibited extensively national and internationally. Alongside his own practise, Barber has always worked as a house painter, and the techniques and strategies of house painting have informed his large-scale abstract artworks. Barber’s work is held in various private and public collections, including the National Collection at Te Papa and the Chartwell Collection at the Auckland Art Gallery.
Ruth Cleland
Ruth Cleland is originally from the Waikato and is currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1998 and Master of Fine Arts (with distinction) in 2002 from the Dunedin School of Art, specialising in printmaking. Cleland has exhibited nationally and internationally in private galleries as well as public art institutions and has won several awards, including the Park Lane Wallace Trust Development Award (2008) and the NZ Painting and Printmaking Award (2003).
Richard Maloy
Born in Auckland, New Zealand (1977), Richard Maloy received a Masters in Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2001 and completed a Fulbright Scholarship based in California in 2010.
Maloy belongs to a generation of artists who upon graduation in the late 1990s, were compelled to find a new artistic language through their inheritance of the competing legacies of the 1960s and 1970s: minimalism, process art, performance, and conceptualism. Like these art movements, Maloy’s practice is attuned to the politics of space and time. His multi-disciplinary practice has included sculpture, photography, installation, and moving image, always drawing on performativity and process to create work.
Ann Shelton
Ann Shelton (b. 1967, Pākehā/Italian) received her MFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada and identifies as queer. Shelton lived in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand until recently, but has now returned to Tāmaki Makaurau. She exhibits internationally.
Shelton’s work has been extensively reviewed in publications including Artforum, Hyperallergic, artnet news, and Evergreen Review. Shelton is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Two Rooms. Her work is collected in public and private contexts throughout Aotearoa, Australia, and North America.
Clinton Watkins
Clinton Watkins investigates affect through the construction of combined immersive experiences of sound, colour and scale. His work focuses on the characteristics, structures, phenomena, and processing of sonic and visual material. Installations incorporate found and custom-made audio and video hardware to create repetition, distortion, duration and form, distilled via a minimalist sensibility. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout New Zealand, Australia, Europe, Asia and the United States. He is represented by Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland. Watkins is also a practicing experimental musician who regularly produces and performs as a solo artist and collaboratively. He holds a Doctoral Degree from Elam School of Fine Arts Auckland and is an Associate Professor at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand specializing in sound and installation practice.
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.
