Culture

Brett McDowell Gallery
Exhibited until 15 May 2014

“At art school we learned discipline, based upon constant immersion regarding things visual. We wanted to ‘know’ beyond social intercourse ... Art school really was the foundation of everything that has happened to me after I graduated in 1966. Any experiences before that simply defined what it was that I didn’t want to do.”

Barry Cleavin is exhibiting at Brett McDowell with For Whom The Wind Blows and it’s reflective, intimate and disturbing. Born in Dunedin in 1939, the printmaker studied at Elam School of Fine Art between 1963 and 1966 before graduating with honours at the University of Canterbury, where he majored in painting. In his later years, between 1978 and 1990, Cleavin was a senior lecturer in printmaking at the University of Canterbury School of Art, and has since been the recipient of various awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship in 1983 to work at the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque University of New Mexico. He was also awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2001.

Widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s most important and influential printmakers, he has received both national and international recognition for his work. Although Cleavin is one of New Zealand’s most collectible printmakers, his work remains affordable and attainable. With a $600–900 price tag per piece, Cleavin effectively brings his work and ideas to a wider audience (i.e. the less financially-elite demographic, composed of people like me, who spend exorbitant amounts of money on expensive art – not to mention the accompanying criticism, which general comes in the form of expensive art books).

Fellow fine arts graduate of the University of Canterbury, author and art critic Pat Unger noted that, “Unlike Duchamp who explored a private experience in riddles, chances and anti-art objects, Cleavin communicates more widely; he exposes the follies, the vices and the ‘boutique fripperies’ of art and of contemporary life with easily available and elegant imagery.”

Cleavin has for many years observed and dissected the polarities of human existence, culminating in often sardonic and disturbing images which challenge the absurd ways in which humans interact with their own, and other, species. It is Cleavin’s contemplation of such destructive interactions that’s imbued in the range of works within this exhibition.

For Whom The Wind Blows presents a nostalgic retrospect of work, featuring an accumulation of drawings and etchings that date back to as early as the 1940s and as late as the early 2000s. A lot of the work derives from anatomical contexts. For decades, bones and skeletons have fascinated Cleavin. In a series of works from the mid-1990s entitled Hungry Sheep, he etched depictions of a ram’s skull he found on a beach at Moeraki, where he has a holiday house. Cleavin commented on this work at the time, saying, “bones are not inert dead things – they just happen to be extremely beautiful. Bird skulls I just love.” In For Whom the Wind Blows you get lost in the sparse, tight and formal lines of the carefully constructed skeletons of native New Zealand species.

Cleavin uses his labour-intensive and age-old techniques of etching and painting to produce works of delicate precision and incisiveness. His drawing and technical skills are outstanding and, driven by an “assiduously acidic” mind, and a technical ability that dissects the shape of things with extraordinary proficiency, he has produced a spectacular body of work that oscillates between more and less vitriolic commentary.

As a master maker of etchings, aquatints, engravings and lithographs (although his most recent images have been digitally rendered), in a combination of figurative, surreal, and cryptic imagery, the exhibition exposes his individual commentary on the seemingly deteriorating world around us.