@ work
Detail of "Try athalon" by Wellesley Binding
23 October 2010 - 30 January 2011
@work
Within this survey of selected works from the last 12 years, Wellesley Binding invites us into a parallel world, which he calls ‘Man Island’.
Through his dark, figurative paintings, Wellesley explores the notion of New Zealand as an “invented European male paradise”. Dramas play out in surreal landscapes and mythologised suburbia. Not only is the complex issue of our search for a national identity addressed, but Wellesley’s own personal journey of ‘artist as lone hero’ is revealed.
Come and see this microcosm of humanity @work.
Wellesley will be giving an artist floor talk at 1.30 pm on November 6.
PRESS RELEASE: Wellesley Binding : @WORK
Hastings City Art Gallery 22 October 2010 – 30 January 2011
Wellesley Binding is a local artist that has widely contibuted to the growing reputation of Hawke’s Bay as an ‘arts destination’. A prolific painter with work held in many public and private collections, he has regularly exhibited.
Many students have been rewarded by his guidance at the Eastern Institute of Technology, where he has taught painting and drawing since 1993. As he approaches retirement age, Wellesley’s own practice has experienced renewed momentum, as if in anticipation of full time attention.
With a lifetime of painting already behind him ‘@Work’ presents a critical selection from the last twelve years. Included are a new series of large canvases extending his interest in the ‘human zoo’. The painter develops his theme of ‘Man Island’, a landscape populated with suit-clad corporates. Predominantly a dark place, characters are only illuminated by laptop or subterranean fissure as the earth’s crust errupts in a contemporary Hieronymous Bosch-like hell on earth. Wellesley occasionaly makes a cameo appearance on Man Island, but usually he remains on the other end of the brush where he can control his ‘sharply dressed and silver tongued’ protagonists. He says:
“ I invented Man Island as a parallel world where no underlying truth or formal essence abounds, and the weather can get bad; the contestation, argument and smallness are out in the exercise yard, as a ‘repository of omissions of New Zealand’s account of itself’, as someone recently put it.”
Wellesley has been a Wallace Art Award finalist seven times and won the Hawke’s Bay Review for his painting three times. Largely self-taught Wellesley sought formal qualifications and gained a Master of Fine arts from Auckland University in 2003. Born in Australia and arriving in New Zealand in 1974, Wellesley has discovered New Zealand ancestry that he says must have lured him across the Tasman all those years ago.
Hastings City Art Gallery, Open 7 Days: 10am-4:30pm Entry is free. www.hastingsartgallery.co.nz
Try Athlon by Wellesley Binding
@ the falls by Wellesley Binding
