14 February - 2 April 2015, Hocken Gallery
Buy the exhibition catalogue here.
Patrick Lundberg’s inconspicuous works deliberately subvert the upscale abstract paintings on which they draw. Traversing the Modernist obsession with formalism, his unassuming paintings disarm and reinvigorate it through the lens of site-specificity, a concern invariably associated with Post-object art.
Lundberg’s paintings meld material and conceptual concerns. He creates his works from sets of oversized map pins that he paints with a plethora of tiny surface markings. Although the arrangement of his miniature pieces for each painting is unscripted, they are invariably spread wide apart on the gallery wall. This dispersed nature of the pictorial elements draws our attention to the gallery wall, which is incorporated into each work, and to the connections and tension between each component.
These fleeting paintings by Lundberg bounce lightly over the history of abstract painting to expand on the past and present a novel future. His approach is inflected with a considerable knowledge of the work of American Minimalist artists. However rather than be self-contained art objects his paintings reference the social realm, specifically the spatial architecture of the gallery and core metaphysical conundrums concerning the relation between things.
The use of the word ‘draft’ in the exhibition’s title stresses the philosophical viewpoint that an object is provisional and based on perception rather than merely ‘being’. While the notion of the object remains key, the experience that the viewer has with his paintings is of primary importance to Lundberg. The need to view the original object is highlighted by the slight physical presence of these paintings, which gives them limited impact when seen from afar or in reproduction.
All of the works in Draft Copy were completed during Lundberg’s time as the 2014 Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago.
Image: Patrick Lundberg, No title, 2014, gesso, acrylic, pencil and varnish on wood, 13 parts, detail.
