Miranda Parkes, Opens Thursday 18 March

Miranda Parkes’ eagerly awaited first solo exhibition in Wellington opens next week as the first solo exhibition at our recently opened new gallery space at Level 2, 22 Garrett Street.

Miranda joins the gallery with an impressive pedigree: more than 20 solo exhibitions, over 50 group exhibitions and numerous awards and residencies including Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, the Olivia Spencer Bower Award, a Tylee Cottage artist residency and the William Hodges Fellowship.

Her exhibition zoomer brings together works made on, and in response to, various substrates. Paint itself has primacy rather than the surface on which it sits; colour is the star and is foregrounded – here glorious fluro colours, golds and silvers are applied to timber pallets, book pages, plastic tiles. With not a stretched flat canvas in sight, the artist has the freedom to talk to painting as a discipline from a slight remove - exploring and dismantling its histories, its motifs and its objectness – the title, zoomer, also a playful reference to the human need to create periods, categorise and historicise.

Twenty small paintings made on pages from an old book are central to zoomer and were the starting point for the show. Miranda began the these during the lockdown, when, unable to go to her studio, she had to work at her kitchen table. As these are made in response to pages from a book about French painting, the pallet works are made in response to the 'typography' of this relief object's surface. This sense of layered depth, a play with ideas about what abstract painting can be and an engagement with three-dimensionality has long characterised Parkes practice with scrunched up ‘voluptuous’ canvases having become her signature.

Miranda herself says of her work: I have the intention that my work will offer a clear-minded, joyful and reflective space for others.

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