Chartwell Exhibition 2003

Nine Lives: The 2003 Chartwell Exhibition , Auckland Art Gallery, Toi O Tamaki,
13 September 2003 - 23 November 2003.

et al. 
Julian Dashper
Jacqueline Fraser
Bill Hammond
Giovanni Intra
Michael Parekowhai
Peter Peryer
John Reynolds
Michael Stevenson

Chartwell thanks the Auckland Art Gallery, Toi O Tamaki, and in particular exhibition curator Robert Leonard. Thanks also to Chartwell registrar Andrea Dornauf.

For transcripts of some of the speeches given at the opening of Nine Lives, read here...

We re-print here an excerpt from the exhibition catalogue by Robert Leonard.

Nine Lives: The 2003 Chartwell Exhibition
By Robert Leonard

Collecting New Zealand and Australian contemporary art is a labour of love for Rob Gardiner. Started in 1974, his Chartwell Collection now includes almost 700 works and continues to grow. It is a major collection, arguably the broadest and most contemporary private collection in New Zealand. The Collection has become a key resource in our work since it came to us on long term loan in 1998.

It is neither exactly a private collection, nor a public one, but a bit of both. Administered by a charitable trust, its missionary objective is to make contemporary art developments more widely known and appreciated. But the Collection also reflects Gardiner's personal odyssey. On the one hand, it betrays his distinctive calls about the directions in which art is moving; his preference for this over that. On the other, it finds him moving with the times, swept along by new developments.

The Collection has really co-evolved with developments in contemporary art. Gardiner has long enjoyed a private collector's freedom to pursue the work of individual artists; a route many art museums have not had the liberty or foresight to take. Consequently the Collection is remarkable for its depth of holdings of particular and now canonical artists. You can track developments across their careers through the works it holds.

Our last - and first - major Chartwell show, 1999's Home and Away, sampled the collection, presenting almost 50 artists with a work each. Artists with a single work in the collection were represented on a similar scale to artists with a dozen. By contrast, I thought it would be interesting to focus on a smaller number of artists Gardiner has collected and continues to collect in depth. This necessarily makes the show a bit retrospective.

I decided to focus on New Zealand artists of the 1980s and 1990s - my generation. In the show et al., Julian Dashper, Jacqueline Fraser, Bill Hammond, Michael Parekowhai, Peter Peryer, John Reynolds and Mike Stevenson are represented, each in their own room, with works drawn from both Chartwell and Gallery collections. Nine Lives shows our collections operating in dialogue.

Into this mix I have inserted a special exhibition-within-the-exhibition looking at the work of a ninth artist, Giovanni Intra, who died last year, at the too-young age of 34. While key Intra works from Chartwell and Gallery collections are included (including a new joint acquisition, Intra's 1990 studded suit), most of the works in this section have been borrowed in. While it tracks across many of the significant developments in New Zealand art in the last 20 years, and while the artists' paths have crossed at many points, I would like Nine Lives to be read essentially as a show of individuals.