Ian Scott's seductive Models paintings exhibition

Media Release – June 16, 2006

Ian Scott’s seductive Models paintings exhibition will provoke widespread interest

Provocative paintings of nude women feature in artist Ian Scott’s Models exhibition which opens at the Ferner Galleries in Auckland next week.

Scott’s paintings will attract a lot of attention partly because of the controversial depiction of scantily-clad or naked women.

Scott, 60, challenges the public to examine issues of morality in his sensual-looking paintings.

He is considered by the art world, as a leading New Zealand artist of the post-McCahon generation who has remained innovative and relentlessly experimental throughout his prodigious career.

Colin McCahon was his painting tutor at Auckland University’s Elam art school. Scott, educated at Kelston Boys, distanced himself from the older painter and developed his own contemporary approach to the landscape.

His bare, nude or partly-clad women in the 1996-2006 series is a culmination of ideas expressed in his playboy-styled ‘Girlie’ works of the sixties and his other `Lattice’ paintings of the seventies and eighties.

Scott’s exhibition history is extensive; he has numerous works in public galleries and private collections throughout New Zealand and Australia including Auckland, Nelson, Palmerston North, Wanganui, Christchurch, Dunedin Wellington, New Plymouth and Canberra.

He said public attitudes to his sensuous nude paintings have changed significantly in the last 30 years.

``I got into trouble with one of my 1968-70 nude series. Some of them were banned from exhibition,’’ Scott said today.

``One series, called Lawnlovers (1969) was taken down and banned. There was a fuss in the media at the time. Times have changed and nude paintings or artwork are readily accepted in New Zealand these days.’’

Ferner Galleries’ managing director Helene Phillips said the art world had changed since the prudish days of the 1960s.

His latest series is a culmination of ideas expressed in his pop-styled ‘Girlie’ works of the sixties and his other `Lattice’ paintings of the seventies and eighties.

Scott’s placement of models plays on their distaste for the figure in art. His Model paintings depict their subjects either to the extreme left or right of the composition.

Phillips said Scott’s models question long held associations of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and distinctions between artistic and pornographic nudes.

``The palpable paintedness of his representations of pornographic photographs shifts the function of these images – they have moved from being pornography to being about pornography.

``The physicality of Scott’s women, painted in a relatively rough, physical manner, breaches the decorum conventionally associated with art nudes.’’

The Models exhibition opens at Ferner Galleries in Parnell on Friday, June 23.

ENDS

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