Peter Robinson Charcoal Drawing

Whangārei Art Museum
8 September –
8 December 2024

Installation view
Peter Robinson
Charcoal Drawing, 2024
Whangārei Art Museum, Whangārei, Aotearoa New Zealand
Photography Nimmy Santhosh

Stretching across two spaces of the gallery, Peter Robinson’s solo exhibition Charcoal Drawing features an assembly of relational quasi-sculptures at the Whangārei Art Museum in Whangārei, Aoetearoa New Zealand.

Proposed here as line drawings expressed spatially, Robinson’s malleable handling of this otherwise rigid material denotes its compositional flexibility, resembling rudimentary or reduced forms such as spirals, ships or waves. Composed of a burnt-wood-veneer aluminium, each sculpture outstretches yet recoils, plotting various indiscriminate coordinates of the gallery along the way.

Across his career, Peter Robinson has remained steadfast in his engagement with the material and object-centred dichotomy between the sacred and vernacular, or ceremonial and quotidian. Buckling and bending these beam-like structures, the artist subverts the proverbial weight and industrial might attributed to the medium, instead promoting questions of illusion and uncertainty throughout the stability of the gallery space.

Peter Robinson
Charcoal Drawing
Whangārei Art Museum
8 September – 8 December 2024

Biography

Widely recognised as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading contemporary artists, Peter Robinson works across sculpture, drawing, printmaking and installation. With a strong focus on studio practice, he is interested in facilitating the play between order and disorder, density and lightness, dispersion and compression. Historically known for a critical exploration of identity politics, Robinson’s early artworks rigorously examined the valences and inheritances of his Māori ancestry and biculturalism. Over the past two decades, the artist has shifted from this rhetoric and weight of interpretation to focus more exclusively on opening new lines of enquiry into the materiality of the mediums with which he works, such as polystyrene, steel, and most extensively, felt. Investigating both the material and metaphoric potential of felt as a medium, Robinson’s recent practice explores the resulting poetic nuances of his material investigation while proposing art history as an open language that develops and adapts via its own twisting web of cause and effect.

Born in Ashburton, Aotearoa New Zealand in 1966, Peter Robinson is an artist of Ngāi Tahu living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He studied sculpture at the Ilam School of Fine Arts (1989) and is currently associate professor and Dean Māori at Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Arts and Design. Robinson’s work has been exhibited extensively in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. He was New Zealand’s representative at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), participated in the 5th Auckland Triennial (2013), 13th Istanbul Biennale (2013), 11th and 18th Biennale of Sydney (1998/2012), the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2018) and the 8th Baltic Triennale of International Art, Vilnius (2002).

Robinson’s work has been the subject of significant solo presentations in both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, including the Auckland Art Gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Artspace Aotearoa, Stedelijk Museum, Artspace Sydney and the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, among others. His work has been included in major international touring exhibitions including Continental shift at the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (2000); Toi Toi Toi: three generations of artists from New Zealand in the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (1999); and Cultural safety: contemporary art from New Zealand at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (1995).

For his exhibition ACK (2008) at Artspace Aotearoa he received the Walters Prize, Aotearoa New Zealand’s preeminent contemporary art award. He has undertaken prestigious residencies across Europe and Australia including the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Goethe Institut in Düsseldorf, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and Artspace in Sydney. His work is included in significant collections internationally including the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, NZ; Musee d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, FR; FRAC Alsace, FR; Denver Art Museum, US; Stedelijk Museum, NL; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, NZ; National Gallery of Victoria, AU and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, AU, among others.

Artist’s profile

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