Who's afraid of walking Frida (Hacienda Fire Remix)
Who's afraid of walking Frida (Hacienda Fire Remix)
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Artist
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Production Date
2015
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Medium
acrylic, primer, ink, rabbit skin glue and canvas on aluminium stretchers
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Size
1600 x 4800 mm
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Credit
Chartwell Collection, commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2015
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Accession Number
C2016/1/4.1-4
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Accession Date
27 Jan 2016
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Department
New Zealand Art
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Classification
Painting
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Collection
Chartwell
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Chartwell Notes
Through much of his painting practice Oliver Perkins looks for mechanisms to return the paintings to the wall – to make a relationship with the architecture that is disjunctive and relational [...] Using a double stretcher system, Perkins fixes a second structure on top of the base structure and pulls the canvas taut creating a subtle echo of the primary support and a staged relief across the panels. The canvas is then treated with glue-size so that it hardens and forms a tough structural support.
The colour palette in [Who's afraid of walking Frida (Hacienda Fire Remix)] is adopted from the colour scheme of a fence in Barbadoes Street, Christchurch. Perkins has returned, after almost a decade away, to Christchurch's central city, which is a city very much in recuperation post-earthquake with redevelopment and dereliction evident in equal measures. With these confident, ambitious colours decorating the surface of his paintings, the implants take on a secondary meaning. In this setting they are fixes to the problems of two dimensionality and relational media, and also outlines of an unseen interior. Operating much like a spacer in a frame, the separate the image from the wall, providing a relief, but also fool us into thinking there is more structure than what is actually evident.
- From the exhibition catalogue of Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show, at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
