During the 1990s Shane Cotton (Ngāpuhi: Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) emerged as a provocative voice in New Zealand art. His detailed and probing paintings took his dual Pakeha and Māori heritage as a starting point and contributed to the debates around identity politics and biculturalism in New Zealand.

In the mid-2000s, however, Shane Cotton’s paintings changed. Instead of a concern with the land and its histories, Cotton turned his attention upwards, to the expansive canvas of the sky. Jettisoning many of his trademark images, removing all reference to stable horizons, and employing an uncanny, nocturnal palette of blue and black, Cotton opened up a new painted space—one that suggested both the outer spaces of science fiction and a mythic spirit realm or underworld.

The new exhibition Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky is a journey through this distinctive airborne world, as Cotton has enlarged, explored and complicated it across six years of energetic art-making. This exhibition is a chance for New Zealand audiences to experience this period of change and transformation in the work of one of our country’s most esteemed painters.

City Gallery Wellington has had a long relationship with Shane Cotton. In 2002 the gallery staged a ten year survey exhibition of the artist’s work. The new exhibition takes a different approach. It is not a full survey show but a succinct and lively presentation of Cotton’s freshest work. It brings together skyscapes from the recent past with an almost equal number of new works, and, says curator Justin Paton, “places the emphasis firmly on the present tense.”

The Hanging Sky is organised by Christchurch Art Gallery in association with the Institute of Modern Art and curated by the Gallery’s Senior Curator Justin Paton. The exhibition has recently toured in Australia, where it was shown at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane and the Campbelltown Arts Centre in Sydney. City Gallery Wellington is delighted to be the homecoming venue for the exhibition, which will be accompanied by a lively series of public programmes.

Image: © Shane Cotton, City Gallery Wellington