Julian Dashper

Julian Dashper was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1960. He graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1981 and has exhibited widely in New Zealand since then, and, in recent years, in Australia, Europe and the United States as well. His work has featured in surveys of New Zealand art abroad including Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand art, MCA, Sydney, 1992 and Cultural Safety: Contemporary art from New Zealand, Frankfurter Kunsverein, 1995.

Curator Robert Leonard writes, for the exhibition:

..."Dashper's references are typically oblique. He offered his 1986 Cass Altarpiece as a homage to Rita Angus, even though, besides the title, it pointedly said nothing about her work. Similarly, while a lot of his works look like generic formal abstractions, a formal reading would seem pointless. The works operate more like algebraic placeholders, drawing attention instead to the context in which they are imbedded. Similarly, alongside a large abstract painting made of readymade stripy canvas, Dashper exhibits a sheet of slides of the work, as if they were its equal. Dashper takes pleasure in disrupting expectations and tweaking the terms of spectatorship. His drumkit homages to great New Zealand painters are especially perverse, involving a deft slip in register. While celebrating mainstream figures, they do so in a traditionally hostile idiom - post-object art installation. They are like a country music tribute to heavy metal."

Leonard's full wall text is displayed at the AAG during Nine Lives.

Visit the artist's website @

http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/juliandashper