Works of art aren’t as well behaved as they used to be. Once upon a time, they stayed where they were put, hanging obediently off picture rails or perching politely on pedestals. Since the arrival of the Duchampian readymade, however, many require a second glance to distinguish them from the world around them, as everyday objects are pressed into service in new, perspective-tilting contexts. There’s another kind of work too, the type Glen Hayward is known for: the readymade’s stealthier cousin. Meticulously, even obsessively, crafted to resemble objects you wouldn’t give another glance, these unobtrusive double agents aim to blend in, adding a subversive frisson to the gallery experience.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

For the exhibition Yellow Moon: He Marama Kōwhai (28 October 2017 – 28 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:

How does it make you feel, this much yellow? Auckland-based Leigh Martin invites us into something big and simple – to feel and experience this colour strongly, up close, glowing, without distraction. Although minimalist it is not empty or silent, and feels generous; a vast surface loaded with carefully poured and layered colour.

Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist Marie Le Lievre’s Cerulean Slipping invites the viewer into the mysterious exploratory pleasures of her painting process. Employing crisp, hard edges alongside blurred boundaries and well-orchestrated liquid merge, it blends semi-controlled and unpredictable procedures. The result hints at mapping, rivers and flood plains, as well as chemical reactions or microscopic examination, while at the same time suggesting a multi-layered imaginative state.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

Intrigued by the deceptions inherent in the act of painting, Tjalling de Vries often exposes tricks of the trade that usually pass unnoticed, while incorporating falsehoods of his own – like painted-on masking tape, counterfeit spills or creases and intricately layered surfaces designed to confuse and misdirect the eye. In Dead Head, transparent polyethylene takes the place of a canvas support, destabilising the picture plane as a site of illusion and suspended disbelief and allowing a view ‘through’ the painting to the wooden stretcher behind.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Since the early 1970s, Bill Culbert has explored the creative possibilities of light, capturing it in wine glasses, windows, lightbulbs, fluorescent tubes and even – as here – a simple plastic bucket. Set down on grass and fallen leaves in a wooded area close to Culbert’s home in France, this unassuming prop takes on a glowing, transcendent beauty as the sunlight fills and illuminates it.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

In 1958 poet and arts patron Charles Brasch, a great supporter of McCahon, said of the Titirangi works: 'These Auckland paintings seem an entirely new departure. The colour and light of Auckland are different from those of the rest of New Zealand; they are more atmospheric, they seem to have an independent, airy existence of their own, and they break up the uniform mass of solid bodies, hills or forests or water, into a kind of brilliant prismatic dance. Some of the paintings are explorations, evocations, of the kauri forest of the Waitakeres. In some you seem to be inside the forest, discovering the structure of individual trees, with their great shaft trunks, their balloon-like cones, and the shafts of light that play among them. In others you look at the forest from outside, as it rises like a wall before you, built up of cylinders and cubes of lighter and darker colour, with its wild jagged outlines against the sky.'

(From the Sun Deck: McCahon’s Titirangi, 17 September 2016 – 6 February 2017)

Australian artist Callum Morton is renowned for works that recast structures and building materials as repositories for human dreams and memories. Here, modern architecture’s humblest unit – the cinder-block – receives a rainbow paint-job that confuses and complicates its purpose. Are these the building blocks of a brighter future or the wistful relics of a destroyed utopia?

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Made following the 2020/11 earthquakes, Shane Cotton’s painting crackles with a supernatural energy. It reveals a swirling, in-between space that recalls the Māori concept of te kore, the void, a realm of potential. Within a canvas full of trailing smoke, dust clouds and gleaming rainbows, physical matter and ideas collide, allowing for connections across time and space. Cotton includes a reference to a modernist carving by Northland artist Clive Arlidge, acknowledging how earlier generations of Māori artists contribute to the whakapapa (genealogy) of today’s artists. Part-ruin, part-vision, the work is charged with echoes of the recent and distant past – and full of anticipation about what may come next.

(Absence, May 2023)

There’s a strangely ahistorical quality to Peter Stichbury’s paintings. While his subjects are clearly contemporary personalities, the weight of the art-historical past stands behind his approach to portraiture. In this powerful image, a young woman is depicted with a thousand-yard-stare –has something has happened in the past that she has not yet come to terms with in the present?

(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)

In 2012, a suite of Christchurch artist Brenda Nightingale’s delicate, brooding ‘Christchurch Hills’ watercolours were reproduced in a limited edition publication, which was given away for free as part of Christchurch Art Gallery’s post-quake Outer Spaces programme. Focusing on the Port Hills that dominate the city’s southern skyline, Nightingale’s paintings subvert the picturesque conventions of the watercolour tradition; privileging, instead of idealised vistas, the often-ordinary objects that complicate our readings of them – lamp-posts, rubbish bins and walking track signs. Here, the trigonometric station at Godley Head offers an unexpected interruption to the view out across the Banks Peninsula headlands. (Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

In the weeks and months that followed the devastating earthquake on 22 February 2011, many Christchurch people looked in vain for a ‘hero on a white horse’ to lead the city out of crisis. Galloping creakily to nowhere, Wayne Youle’s riderless Saviour punctures the notion of a knight in shining armour. Instead, it emphasises his belief that this city’s salvation lies in the hands of ordinary people: all those who stayed – through choice or necessity – and contributed to the recovery in countless, unsung ways.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Tim J. Veling's photographs of post-quake Christchurch are studies in memory and transformation. From a body of work titled Adaptation, this nocturnal image reveals the strangeness of the transitional city, not least its moments of surprising, eerie beauty.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

This work belongs to a small group of related compositions from the same viewpoint, thought to have been painted by Frances Hodgkins while she stayed at The Croft, a cottage in Somerset owned by the writer Geoffrey Gorer. Completed in Hodgkins’ distinctive style, in which form and colour are blended to create an intense and lyrical impression of place, it rewards sustained viewing with a gradual unfolding of content – trees, reflective water, a model boat. Considered one of New Zealand’s greatest painters, Hodgkins pursued her practice with originality and tenacity, noting: “[I]t is so easy to paint like your master & to think other people’s thoughts, the difficulty is to be yourself, assimilate all that is helpful but keep your own individuality, as your most precious possession – it is one’s only chance.”

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Stephen Bambury has said of the titles he gives his works: “I like to put down a scent that can be followed.” In this case, that trail leads us towards the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), who in 1932 painted a work he named Red House. Malevich’s suprematism – geometric forms painted in a limited palette to represent the supremacy of ‘pure feeling’ – sought to reset the ‘givens’ of painting and perception, recognising how the relationship between two-dimensional objects on a pictorial plane could suggest movement, volume and symbolic meaning. On longer looking, the initial flatness of Bambury’s simplified house motif – which recurs frequently throughout his practice – gives way to a sense of perspectival depth, opening the image up to considerations of shelter and containment.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

In 2009, renowned Christchurch painter Philip Trusttum surprised us with an exceptionally generous offer: a gift of twenty paintings, selected by the Gallery and with no limitation on scale or value. The first ten works entered the collection the following year, and rumbling in amongst them was Depot, this colossal gas-guzzler of a painting that hums with Trusttum’s trademark physical energy. The audacious scale belies the work’s diminutive origins; the artist found his inspiration in the toy trucks his young grandson William played with in his studio.

Don Peebles travelled to Sydney in 1950, in search of a more modern art training than was available to him in Wellington. (‘Nothing much was going on in Wellington other than us being taught to draw a foot that looked like a foot,’) he said. His teacher John Passmore (1904–1984) introduced his students to early twentieth-century European modernism: Bonnard and Picasso, Cézanne and cubism. ‘That was modernism to me. That was the latest thing as far as I knew in those days.’ Passmore also encouraged his students to paint around the waterfront, a regular subject for his own work in the early 1950s. Sydney Harbour reveals Peebles moving towards the abstraction that would characterise his mature work, but not yet completely there (he made his first completely abstract work a few years later in London). A Cézanne-esque concern for planes, facets and the structure of forms is evident, even while buildings, water and distant hills remain visible.

(March 2016)

The work on the three tables at the centre of this room is part of a series of sculptures artist Francis Upritchard has described as “an attempt at an unsuccessful utopia”. Like the flipped-back word in its title, it seems to set off in one direction – towards a kind of visionary, psychedelic paradise – but overturns our expectations to arrive somewhere much less certain. Locked away in intensely private reveries, the delicate, marionette-like figures that inhabit it are curiously enigmatic: part-primeval bog people, part-countercultural prophets, they live out their radiant existences somewhere between the ancient unknowable past and the distant unknowable future.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

In classical times, a gold coin was inserted into a dead person's mouth as a ‘Charon’s obol’, a ritualistic payment for the ferry ride across the river Acheron to the underworld. With its blackened skeleton, crawling flies and shroud-like canopy of moths (cut free from the pages of National Geographic magazines), this work evokes an atmosphere of death and decay – but a closer look also reveals small signs of regeneration.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Depending on your perspective, this curvy work by Sarah Lucas shifts between elegant Classical sensuality and in-your-face sexiness. It was inspired in part by the stylised and strangely modern female figurines of the Cycladic culture, which flourished on the islands of the central Aegean during the Early Bronze Age. Sarah made her tightly entwined sculpture from fluff-stuffed pantyhose, complete with associations of eroticism and control. It’s a cheeky invitation to consider society’s expectations about appearance, gender and sexuality.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

English-born Eileen Mayo excelled across a remarkable range of media, including drawing, linocuts, wood engraving, lithography, tapestry and silk screening. She also became a sought-after commercial designer, known for exquisitely detailed and balanced images that appeared on stamps and coins in Australia and New Zealand. Mayo had lived in New Zealand for twenty years when she made this screenprint of young fern fronds in the lush native bush. One of her last prints, it combines an enduring appreciation of the natural world with extraordinary technical ability, conveying not only the beauty of the plants she depicts, but a sense of their place within a complex and interconnected ecosystem.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Mountford Tosswill (Toss) Woollaston was the eldest of five sons of share-milking dairy farmers in Taranaki. His working life started divided between rural manual labour – mainly seasonal fruit and tobacco picking – and artistic pursuits, initially poetry before he found his vocation as a painter. Early study included two terms each at the Canterbury College School of Art in 1931 and the Dunedin School of Art in 1932. Woollaston held his first solo exhibition in Dunedin in 1936; his commitment to modernism at this time marked him out as singular. By the early 1960s, when he made this vigorous drawing of his youngest brother shearing, the by-then Greymouth- based artist was gaining increased recognition. In 1966 he began to work on his art full-time.

(Beneath the ranges, 18 February – 23 October 2017)

For the exhibition Yellow Moon: He Marama Kōwhai (28 October 2017 – 28 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:

Max Gimblett is a New Zealand artist living in New York who makes art for contemplation and healing. For him, the art-making process embraces awareness of the unknown and the idea of being part of something bigger. He says: “Human is a tiny part of things. The ocean, the unconscious – these are things that are not knowable. Sometimes you can participate in a work from and in that source.” Gimblett also values “the curiosity that’s endless in beginning a drawing or a painting”, and attempts “to find a voice that will deliver the maximum content in the cleanest, clearest aesthetics”.

“The inherent mystery of painting and drawing. It not being a skill or a talent but rather an enquiry, speculation, probing the depths, searching for a way into the plane. Whatever you are thinking, in Mind, becomes a translation when flattened into the plane, there is thinking in paint, in gesture, into the plane which is unlike any other activity in life. It is mute, silent, rather like being in the sea, under the surface, and looking upwards into the sun striking low through the waters.” —Max Gimblett (Max Gimblett: Ocean Wheel 1 August – 15 November 2020)

At its simplest, a quatrefoil is constructed from four perfect, intersecting circles. Found in both Eastern and Western religious art, it has also been used to order and understand the physical world, most familiarly through the quartered segments of the clock and compass. Once described as a secular artist with a great respect for religious traditions, Max Gimblett has frequently opted for this shape over the more usual – but no less arbitrary – rectangular canvas. Here he combines it with gleaming gold leaf that has been finely scored to create a painting that seems to rush out towards us while simultaneously drawing us into its centre. Though his work is abstract, Gimblett’s title summons up the view of an enthroned Christ as depicted by the early Renaissance painter and friar Fra Angelico; surrounded by a shimmering aureole of golden light, radiating knowledge, power and glory.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Between 1974 and 1977 Jeffrey created twenty-four extraordinary, jewel like paintings based on photographs of his relatives, marshalled together for the obligatory snapshots to mark important family occasions. In this case it’s the artist’s grandparents who are lined up before a car and buildings at Okains Bay in their Sunday best. In this series, known as Harris’s ‘Icons’, Jeffrey drew on the fifteenth-century religious paintings of Sienese artist Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo (il Sassetta). His admiration of Sassetta’s paintings can be seen in the luminous colours and spatial clarity of Grandparents at Okains.

(Jeffrey Harris: The Gift, 1 October 2022 – 12 March 2023)

Shifting fluidly between abstraction and representation, Barbara Tuck’s intricate, interwoven paintings trace an imaginative path through real landscapes – the ancient mountains, rivers and valleys of New Zealand’s South Island. With multiple horizon-lines, oscillating viewpoints and lyrical juxtapositions, she reinvents this much-painted terrain, inviting us into a startling and enthralling dreamworld.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)