ECHOES | George Savill / Pat Hanly / Nigel Brown

Echoes reveals a range of approaches to art-making in New Zealand while highlighting common interests about history, land, and lived experience. From Hanly’s celebratory exuberance to Brown’s socially charged narratives, and Savill’s re-evaluation of still life traditions; Echoes is a conversation across generations.

Pat Hanly’s important works showcase the artist’s iconic Pacific-informed use of high colour and sensuous abstraction and the role of lived experience. At the centre of his work lay environmental and political issues as much as his love of the human figure. Expressive, vivid and provocative, Hanly (like Nigel Brown) believed that art served a significant social purpose. Featuring four significant stained glass works, it should be noted that Hanly worked with glass as a key medium – perhaps more than any other artist in New Zealand - right throughout his entire career.

Nigel Brown examines New Zealand’s social and historical issues and national character in a quite different manner. He builds both visual and word narratives, examining identities that are both personal and collective. He questions our past and its impact on today. “Who are we now?” he asks. “Is it real or just make-believe?” Thus, he directly questions the viewer, seeking answers to cultural conundrums and the at threat role of the individual today.

George Savill is a new voice in the conversation, reimagining historical tropes and creating gestural, stroke-driven, animated still lifes. His work uses the frame as a fundamental part of the pictorial space: they overflow (as if seeking escape) and push against such presumptive boundaries and formalities. Exuberant and beautiful, Savill is having a direct conversation with the genre and history of still life.