now at lumiere.net.nz
Happy Anniversary Gallery
Bowen Galleries celebrate 25 years in operation. MARK AMERY pays another visit to a Wellington instituion relishing its silver anniversary.
“Dead Set 2”, Warwick Freeman, 2006 (The Window Gallery @ Bowen Galleries)
THE RELATIONSHIP between artist and dealer is a kind of marriage. It requires trust, respect, good communication, and more than a little love and affection.
Additional stress is provided by both partners having financially precarious careers. You can also imagine in times of strain that the attention a dealer lavishes on other artists or buyers (also important long term relationships) might be judged infidelities.
Like wedding anniversaries, gallery anniversaries then could be considered worth celebrating. Recognition that lasting the distance between paper and silver anniversaries is no mean feat.
This year both Bowen Galleries and Janne Land celebrate silver anniversaries after 25 years in operation (Janne Land 29 years as a dealer in total). Meanwhile Wellington’s longest surviving contemporary dealer Peter McLeavey celebrates 40. They don’t like to make a big fuss about it. One of their mutual secrets to success is, like the white gallery walls, a quiet modesty that gives their artists’ work all the attention.
From Warwick Freeman’s outstanding window work to a stockroom display showing off the very finest of the gallery’s strong stable, at Bowen Galleries this month there are however sure signs that an anniversary is being celebrated.
In the front Ghuznee Room, photographer and long time patron David Lewis displays amongst his celebratory frieze of images social pictures from countless openings since the late 1980s. In the central gallery space a landscape group exhibition features now Australian-based (recent winner of Australia’s Blake Art Prize) Euan Macleod, who Neligan first met when he walked in off the street during her first show in 1981 – a show of work by Debra Bustin. Bowen artists to this day, Macleod, Bustin and Alison Clouston had had a group exhibition at the Settlement Gallery, but from there (like for many other promising artists in Wellington) there was nowhere else to go.
Success for dealers like Neligan, Land and McLeavey isn’t just in the length of time they can keep their doors open, but the healthy state of their marriages with artists. So it is with Macleod and fellow current exhibitors here like Shona Rapira Davies and Jeff Thomson.
It’s easy to forget that the motivation for opening Bowen for Neligan was the same as it is for many young curators today – “nobody was showing the work of young artists” says Neligan. The year was 1981, a time of street activism and protest. Neligan set up shop in Bowen Street, across from parliament and in 1982 Stuart Page had an exhibition of his ‘81 tour photographs there, projecting some of his images onto the Beehive across the road.
Neligan describes the first six to eight years as frightening. She was dependant on a part-time job, and it still only remains viable part-time. In 1989. with a move to The Terrace she began a partnership with Christopher Moore, who opened his own gallery alongside.
Neligan and Moore shifted into Ghuznee Street in 2000, and after Moore left last year Neligan brought in a business partner Penney Moir and also made room for a café and a hireable project space. Neligan has for a long time now placed some emphasis in her stable on representing sculptors. While other dealers often choose cheaper upstairs spaces, for Bowen a ground floor space with easy access is essential.
Neligan found the early 1980s exciting times with a lot of development and support amongst both public and private galleries. The art market was also on the rise, but then its crash saw survival in the early 1990s particularly tough. With beneficiary cuts everybody cut back spending she says, and corporations worried clients would object to spending on art. The 1999 Labour government’s positive words about the arts made a huge amount of difference to market confidence, Neligan believes, and in the last six years things have been far more buoyant.
Bowen Galleries has responded to dealer Christopher Moore’s departure last year with fresh energy and ideas. A Workshop e (Jeff Brown and Martin Kelly) redesign of the space, with moveable partitions to create flexible gallery areas, is a triumph. In the stockroom large cubbyholes allow for the display of a myriad of small work from stock (currently Rapira Davies’ magnificently emotively charged figures in clay and Gregor Kregar’s glowing gnomes) next to wall works (much underappreciated painters Kim Pieters and Joanna Braithwaite). The café Milk Crate, opening out into the Ghuznee Room, brings the world into the gallery space beautifully – a successful innovation for a New Zealand dealer gallery.
The Ghuznee Room is used mainly as a project space. Artists and curators on selection may hire the space for the cost it takes to keep it open, with Bowen Galleries not charging any commission. Through this device Neligan has found a way to continue to meet that original aim of showing the work of emerging artists while also supporting her large stable.
My favourite space is the front window. Curated separately, the gallery’s artists have thus far risen splendidly to the challenge of creating major singular work that will be arresting on this busy streetfront. Warwick Freeman’s ‘Dead Set 2’ is no exception. A tondo made out of silver capped birds beaks and claws, this is collected roadkill as pendants. Featuring everything from the blackbird to the penguin and albatross, there’s a beguiling tension between animation and allurement.
77 on the 7th David Lewis and Landscape – New Work by Geoff Dixon, Euan Macleod, Paulus McKinnon, Leo Robba and Jeff Thomson, until November 25, Bowen Galleries.
“Dead Set 2”, Warwick Freeman, 2006 (The Window Gallery @ Bowen Galleries)
THE RELATIONSHIP between artist and dealer is a kind of marriage. It requires trust, respect, good communication, and more than a little love and affection.
Additional stress is provided by both partners having financially precarious careers. You can also imagine in times of strain that the attention a dealer lavishes on other artists or buyers (also important long term relationships) might be judged infidelities.
Like wedding anniversaries, gallery anniversaries then could be considered worth celebrating. Recognition that lasting the distance between paper and silver anniversaries is no mean feat.
This year both Bowen Galleries and Janne Land celebrate silver anniversaries after 25 years in operation (Janne Land 29 years as a dealer in total). Meanwhile Wellington’s longest surviving contemporary dealer Peter McLeavey celebrates 40. They don’t like to make a big fuss about it. One of their mutual secrets to success is, like the white gallery walls, a quiet modesty that gives their artists’ work all the attention.
From Warwick Freeman’s outstanding window work to a stockroom display showing off the very finest of the gallery’s strong stable, at Bowen Galleries this month there are however sure signs that an anniversary is being celebrated.
In the front Ghuznee Room, photographer and long time patron David Lewis displays amongst his celebratory frieze of images social pictures from countless openings since the late 1980s. In the central gallery space a landscape group exhibition features now Australian-based (recent winner of Australia’s Blake Art Prize) Euan Macleod, who Neligan first met when he walked in off the street during her first show in 1981 – a show of work by Debra Bustin. Bowen artists to this day, Macleod, Bustin and Alison Clouston had had a group exhibition at the Settlement Gallery, but from there (like for many other promising artists in Wellington) there was nowhere else to go.
Success for dealers like Neligan, Land and McLeavey isn’t just in the length of time they can keep their doors open, but the healthy state of their marriages with artists. So it is with Macleod and fellow current exhibitors here like Shona Rapira Davies and Jeff Thomson.
It’s easy to forget that the motivation for opening Bowen for Neligan was the same as it is for many young curators today – “nobody was showing the work of young artists” says Neligan. The year was 1981, a time of street activism and protest. Neligan set up shop in Bowen Street, across from parliament and in 1982 Stuart Page had an exhibition of his ‘81 tour photographs there, projecting some of his images onto the Beehive across the road.
Neligan describes the first six to eight years as frightening. She was dependant on a part-time job, and it still only remains viable part-time. In 1989. with a move to The Terrace she began a partnership with Christopher Moore, who opened his own gallery alongside.
Neligan and Moore shifted into Ghuznee Street in 2000, and after Moore left last year Neligan brought in a business partner Penney Moir and also made room for a café and a hireable project space. Neligan has for a long time now placed some emphasis in her stable on representing sculptors. While other dealers often choose cheaper upstairs spaces, for Bowen a ground floor space with easy access is essential.
Neligan found the early 1980s exciting times with a lot of development and support amongst both public and private galleries. The art market was also on the rise, but then its crash saw survival in the early 1990s particularly tough. With beneficiary cuts everybody cut back spending she says, and corporations worried clients would object to spending on art. The 1999 Labour government’s positive words about the arts made a huge amount of difference to market confidence, Neligan believes, and in the last six years things have been far more buoyant.
Bowen Galleries has responded to dealer Christopher Moore’s departure last year with fresh energy and ideas. A Workshop e (Jeff Brown and Martin Kelly) redesign of the space, with moveable partitions to create flexible gallery areas, is a triumph. In the stockroom large cubbyholes allow for the display of a myriad of small work from stock (currently Rapira Davies’ magnificently emotively charged figures in clay and Gregor Kregar’s glowing gnomes) next to wall works (much underappreciated painters Kim Pieters and Joanna Braithwaite). The café Milk Crate, opening out into the Ghuznee Room, brings the world into the gallery space beautifully – a successful innovation for a New Zealand dealer gallery.
The Ghuznee Room is used mainly as a project space. Artists and curators on selection may hire the space for the cost it takes to keep it open, with Bowen Galleries not charging any commission. Through this device Neligan has found a way to continue to meet that original aim of showing the work of emerging artists while also supporting her large stable.
My favourite space is the front window. Curated separately, the gallery’s artists have thus far risen splendidly to the challenge of creating major singular work that will be arresting on this busy streetfront. Warwick Freeman’s ‘Dead Set 2’ is no exception. A tondo made out of silver capped birds beaks and claws, this is collected roadkill as pendants. Featuring everything from the blackbird to the penguin and albatross, there’s a beguiling tension between animation and allurement.
77 on the 7th David Lewis and Landscape – New Work by Geoff Dixon, Euan Macleod, Paulus McKinnon, Leo Robba and Jeff Thomson, until November 25, Bowen Galleries.
Mark Amery's visual arts column courtesy of the Dominion Post, Friday November 17, 2006. Lumière will continue to reprint installments of Mark's column on a ongoing basis.
