Exhibition: Bill Culbert 2021

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⁠Spanning an incredible 60-year career, the artist had more than 100 solo exhibitions worldwide. Culbert was notable for his use of light in painting, photography, sculpture and installation work, as well as his use of found and recycled materials. ⁠

⁠This exhibition comprises Culbert's iconic series Strait - a luminous line of fluorescent tubes and an eclectic mix of repurposed vessels wrapped around three adjacent walls. Culbert reunited these 'objects of my affection', as Man Ray called his versions of Duchampian ready-mades, and replaced them with a delicacy and chromatic brilliance.⁠

Culbert's sculpture demonstrates his inventiveness with illumination, opacity, shadow, transparency and reflection with found objects. From suitcases pierced with fluorescent tubes, repurposed furniture, vast arrays of reclaimed plastic containers, Culbert celebrated common things and imbues them with poetic presence. The artist's ability to transform ordinary and often discarded materials into an extraordinary 'otherness' is uplifting. Combining light, composition and materials with a rare economy, he produced art that is surreal, lyrical and challenging in the way it invites us to revalue familiar objects and refocus our perceptions.

• Opening reception: Thursday, 17 June 6-8pm.⁠

• Exhibition dates: 17 June - 17 July 2021.⁠

Opening reception

As numbers for the opening reception are limited,⁠ please secure your ticket via the Eventbrite link.

Bill Culbert represented New Zealand at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, his exhibition Front Door Out Back _was displayed in the New Zealand pavilion, sited at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà. A solo exhibition Bill Culbert: Slow Wonder will be held at Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand from 3 July - 10 October, 2021.

He studied at Canterbury University School of Fine Arts (1953-56) and in 1957 he received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London, gaining a silver medal for painting. Since the 1960s, Culbert had held numerous solo exhibitions at major institutions in New Zealand, England, Europe, the USA and Australia, among many group exhibitions and public commissions. Notable solo exhibitions include C_entral Station, The Return, Andata Ritorno, Geneve (2016); Bill Culbert, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, France (2015); Bill Culbert,National Art School, Sydney (2015); Light levels, Château des Adhémar, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Montélimar, France (2014); Bill Culbert: State of Light, Peer, London (2009); and Bill Culbert: Groundworks, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2008).

His extraordinarily diverse career has also led him to produce large public commissions over the past two decades. Notable public commissions include a large neon work for the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Tower in Auckland, and Skyline a 30-metre-long neon installation for the Millennium Dome in London.