SHANE COTTON
Smoking Gun
10 MAY - 9 JUNE 2012

This suite of paintings demonstrates Cotton's continued interest in the early Maori modernist movement of the 1950s-60s in New Zealand, and in the forms of Surrealist and Cubist painting. Cotton invokes the motifs and palettes of early key figures of contemporary Maori art in an homage which also involves a playful sense of juxtaposition with newer, less historical forms.

In Smoking Gun, totemic figures and household objects share an ambivalent ground. Sharp spatial shifts, characteristic of Cotton's recent paintings, allude to the imbrications of pre-contact Maori society and the religious impulse of colonising settlement in New Zealand. The conflicting perspectives also point towards traditional values and contemporary life; emblematic of culturally universal 'split' identities.

Consistent with earlier references, Cotton has kept the work in Smoking Gun at an intimate, domestic scale, quietly asserting through exceptional painting technique an object-like presence. Contrasting the high-keyed colours and simplified, planar forms of mid-Twentieth Century painting with finely-detailed passages of heavy cloud and lingering smoke; Cotton's new works propose implausible pictorial spaces as analogous to the cultural shifts experienced during the times when these visual forms first emerged.



BIOGRAPHY

Shane Cotton was born in 1964 in Upper Hutt, New Zealand, and is of Ngati Rangi, Ngati Hine and Te Uri Taniwha descent. His Maori heritage is located in New Zealand’s Northland. Graduating in 1991 with a Fine Arts Degree and Diploma in Teaching from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, Cotton taught at Massey University in the Maori Visual Arts programme from 1993–2003.

A major survey of Cotton’s work was exhibited at City Gallery Wellington and Auckland Art Gallery in 2003. Prestigious international exhibitions have followed at the Asia Society Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (both 2004) and as New Zealand’s representative at the Prague Biennial (2005). His work was included in the 3rd Auckland Biennial (2007) and the Biennale of Sydney (2010).

Cotton’s many awards include the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship (1998); the Seppelt Contemporary Art Award (1998); the Te Waka Toi Award for New Work (1998, 1999); and the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate (2008).

Cotton’s work is held in numerous public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria; National Gallery of Australia; Queensland Art Gallery; Auckland Art Gallery; Chartwell Collection, Auckland; Christchurch City ArtGallery; Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongawera, Wellington.