MEDIA RELEASE Wednesday 26 June 2013
Gallery produces major new book on Shane Cotton
Christchurch Art Gallery’s ambitious publishing programme continues with a major new book on Shane Cotton, one of New
Zealand’s most acclaimed painters.
Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky is a grandly scaled book presenting Cotton’s complex and provocative skyscapes – vast nocturnal spaces where birds
speed and plummet – as well as a spectacular new body of work.
Senior curator and lead author Justin Paton, who was the driving force behind the project, is excited the book is now
available to the public.
“This is a very special book, not just in terms of its scale and production values, but because it brings together
highlights from the past half-decade of Cotton’s practice alongside a body of new work – including a vast new
mural-scale painting, a spectacular suite of ‘target’ prints, and a line-up of painted baseball bats that suggest both
trophies and weapons.”
As well as more than 70 large-scale reproductions of artworks by Cotton, the book contains four distinctive new
responses to the works. New York essayist Eliot Weinberger offers a poetic meditation on what he calls ‘the ghosts of
birds’ in Cotton’s paintings. Justin Paton plots his own encounters with Cotton across six years in which the artist was
constantly ‘finding space’. Melbourne-based curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow confronts the haunting role of Toi
moko—tattooed Māori heads—in the paintings and in her own past. Lastly, Robert Leonard, Director of the Institute of
Modern Art, Brisbane, argues the case for Cotton as a cultural surrealist exploring ‘the treachery of images’.
Cotton has been one of the country’s most acclaimed painters for two decades. His works of the 1990s played a pivotal
part in that decade’s debates about place, belonging and bicultural identity. However, in the mid 2000s, he headed
‘skyward’ and painted the first in what would become a major series of skyscapes.
Designed by award-winning artist and designer Aaron Beehre, this much anticipated and beautifully executed book features
72 large colour plates, a foil-stamped cloth cover and blue pages edges.
The book has been produced in conjunction with The Hanging Sky exhibition, which was curated by Paton and opened at City Gallery Wellington at the weekend. The exhibition has also
toured in Australia where it showed in the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane and at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in
Sydney.
For more information visit www.christchurchartgallery.org.nz.
Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky ($120 / 192 pages / hardback / foil-stamped cloth cover / blue page edges / 72 full colour plates) is available from
the Gallery’s shop at 40 Lichfield Street.
It is also available from bookstores around the country.
ENDS