Milford Galleries - All Featured Artists

Galia Amsel

Galia Amsel’s work is characterised by exploration of colour, form, motion and intervention. The simplicity of her work comes from a “highly developed visual sense” and spatial harmonies founded in “geometry and the resolution of mathematical formulae”. Her basic shapes are the forms of a circle, rectangle or square which have been “broken open or interrupted in some way” and these openings “always create drama and tension.” Inevitably, the “empty spaces… are as important as those occupied by the glass mass.”1

Callum Arnold

Callum Arnold challenges the traditional representation of the landscape as static. His paintings are “reminiscent of a Sunday journey. …Long drives through the landscape are experienced in passing through the car window.” (1)

Wayne Barrar

Wayne Barrar: "Most of my work is centred on the impact on land of the consequences of shifting cultural practices. Occasionally I will venture into the laboratory, as a place of change, in order to investigate human intervention at a ‘micro’ level. At other times I may revisit historical imagery or sites as a reference point…. In order to deal with the complexities and ironies inherent in the relationship between people and the environment, my work has evolved into a number of series – some finite, others ongoing. They may vary in approach and process, but in all of them the central consideration is this inter-relationship between culture and nature in an increasingly complex society."(1)

Tony Bishop

"Tony Bishop's artwork uses vibrant, cheerful colours and a deceptively simple childlike style to depict themes of death, murder, hopelessness and poverty. Despite the heavy subject matter Tony’s unique sense of humour comes through strongly. His paintings often have reoccurring images of flames, birds of prey and dogs and always tell a story. Sometimes Tony writes a postscript to go with the painting, with other paintings the stories and the implied emotions are very apparent. There is a strong rural favour to Tony’s work, a reflection of his early experiences." (1)

Claudia Borella

Joanna Braithwaite

In her most recent work, Joanna Braithwaite juxtaposes objects, animals, humans and insects onto lavish painterly surfaces in unexpected and imaginative ways. Joanna Braithwaite has been exhibiting her idiosyncratic paintings in New Zealand and Australia for 20 years and regularly shows work at Milford Galleries Auckland, Dunedin and Queenstown. She characteristically works in series and her immediate environment often prompts her subject matter. “Braithwaite’s work always contains figurative and realist elements but seldom without a twist which wrenches the work away from simple realism towards the surreal.” (1)

Nigel Brown

Nigel Brown has established a reputation as one the most important figurative artists working in New Zealand and is acknowledged as New Zealand’s leading narrative artist. His distinctive works are a blend of symbolic and expressionistic approaches with a deep social concern. He regularly exhibits his paintings at both Milford Galleries Dunedin and milford galleries queenstown.

Christine Cathie

The integral nature of rhythm and motion is captured in Christine Cathie’s elegantly simple glass sculptures. Her “curvaceous ribbon and waveforms have a spontaneous elegance that comes from its undulating waveform. Her works are lyrical in nature and to this end, Cathie uses the angularity of edge and shape deftly. There is an uncomplicated and convincing use of contrasting glass density and mass, expressing tones, moods and space.” (1)

Simon Clark

"The past, which these paintings draws upon, is the past located around the early 1960s which is the period of my childhood living in New Zealand. The early 1960s is a period, which is being represented today under the connoted structure of “Kiwiana”." (1)

Meredith Collins

New Zealand painter Meredith Collins describes her work as “figurative oil painting based on narrative”. Her use of pale tones and reserved but engaging expressions in her unconventional portraits of both real and mythological women and children create a serene and introspective feel. Collins explores her cultural identity and personal heritage in her paintings using Ta Moko and evocative symbolism to address her Maori and European ties.

Garry Currin

Currin’s work is …made major by a scope that encompasses not only the edgy physical attributes of its subject, but also the metaphorical implications, so that Currin actually captures the power, the darkness and the malevolence of the very thing that he paints.” (1)

Neil Dawson

“Born and bred in New Zealand, Neil Dawson is a sculptor of international standing. All of Dawson’s works emphatically echo aspects of this nation’s socio-cultural environments and, literally, elevate these in spatial celebrations that are at once accessible and challenging. A central achievement discernable in this sculptor’s work is his ability to embody in pure space, clusters of socio-cultural and global concerns.”(1)

Gennie de Lange

Gennie de Lange’s brilliantly coloured glazed ceramic tiles have a clear Mediterranean feel. Shadows of dogs and their people haunt these summertime memories. “Rich glaze effects, luminous, transparent and glowing colours with simple forms underpin her work. The landscape and architecture are minimised to stripes and blocks and are enlivened by shadows of people who seem to tell a story.” (1)

Anita DeSoto

Anita DeSoto makes myths with paint that are based on stories that have been drawn from the worlds of literature, opera, the Bible and the artist’s life. This amalgam of autobiography and drama, pleasure and pain, nature and dream, and so on firmly establishes the contradiction of paradox upon parable.

Evelyn Dunstan

Evelyn Dunstan’s works have narrative purposes, methods of making and representational concerns which are atypical in the history of glass practise in NZ. Her works are literal and intricate. Due to significant scale and mass variations

John Edgar

Acclaimed sculptor John Edgar has been exhibiting since 1979 including three New Zealand public touring exhibitions “Calculus” 2002-2004, “Lie Of The Land” 1998-1999, and “Making Amends” 1993-1995. In 2004, Edgar installed a major commission at the Auckland Domain titled ‘Transformer’.

Simon Edwards

Simon Edwards: “The landscape has been the source of my work…The work places itself somewhere between a modernistic reliance on the essential qualities (of the materials and methods of painting), and an awareness of traditional forms of the landscape. I use this as a departure point, for entering into a process of layering and rubbing back, setting up a dialogue between myself, the medium and the landscape. The work becomes a result of reacting to what is happening on the surface at the time, and building on chance effects that present themselves, contributing to a sense of space, distance and movement.” (1)

Wendy Fairclough

“Fairclough playfully disrupts the viewer’s idea of what glass should look like, eschewing its reflectivity and transparency in favour of cloudy, translucent, sandblasted or engraved surfaces.” (1)

Neil Frazer

Although the surfaces of Neil Frazer’s paintings owe something to the American abstract expressionist movement of the 1950s, he has developed a deeply personal approach to the medium. “The oddly compelling nature of Neil Frazer’s body of work is not solely the result of his handling of paint. The power of the works hinges on his creation of a duality of spatial illusion and material literalness on a scale that is all-involving. The picture plane is rendered elusive, replaced by optical recession and tactile fact, resisting a complete assimilation of the image. The works all operate on this frontal/recessive contradiction, evoking simultaneously thick, constructive curtains of paint and veiled depths.” (1)

Dick Frizzell

“In Dick Frizzell’s first solo exhibition of 1978 his paintings’ deadpan humour was fringed with a barely suppressed exuberance and delight. The paintings collided the pragmatics of an ad-mans’ need for a compelling motif with the visceral pleasures of expressive modernist painting. Like the best of his work between then and now, these images of gaudy fish tin labels and comic strip characters…conveyed the freshness and magic of a first encounter.”(1)

Charlotte Handy

Charlotte Handy’s paintings explore “the tensions between abstract and literal, land and sea, surface and depth.” (1) The atmospheres established move between the realms of implied, real and imaginary while Handy dissolves perspective to play games with the viewer’s perception. Key in these paintings is the state of constant visual flux: nothing is fixed or certain or final.

Rebecca Harris

For Maori, early contact with Europeans “constituted in an exotic vision of unrecognisable people and incomprehensible technologies”. (1) For Rebecca Harris, "It is this brief moment in New Zealand history, the beginning of widespread contact between Maori and Pakeha that has acted as a springboard.”(2)

Niki Hastings-McFall

Niki Hastings-McFall’s personal research into her own heritage, beliefs and cultural diversity has informed her art practice which reflects on the merging of cultures and New Zealand’s role in the creation of an urban Pacific. Her previous works have used a variety of media including shells, glass beads, metal, filmstrip, and plastic which she has crafted into exquisite Pacific lei and breastplates.

Michael Hight

Michael Hight is a painter, sculptor and assembler, working with paint, canvas, tin, wood and found objects. His most recent series of work has focused on beehives. He continues to explore this subject through both abstract assemblages and realist paintings. Hight regularly exhibits at both Milford Galleries Dunedin and milford galleries queenstown.

Megan Huffadine

"Domestic Activity and the small rituals that are part of everyday life are the focus of Megan Huffadine's mixed media work, and she brings a questioning, thoughtful analysis to her highly individual pieces." (1)

Bruce Hunt

Critically acclaimed artist Bruce Hunt conveys an authoritative sense of location and vernacular, his paintings capturing the enduring majesty of the Central Otago landscape.

Robyn Irwin

“Robyn Irwin’s flared glass vessels stand apart from the usual. Her simple organic shapes are manipulated and deconstructed to create curious elliptical forms. Irwin debates the issues of form and establishes tensions, to amplify and augment a visual narrative concerning the precarious strata and volcanic nature of the New Zealand landscape.” (1)

Luke Jacomb

New Zealand glass artist Luke Jacomb has received considerable critical attention, awards and inclusion in major museum collections worldwide.

Hannah Kidd

Franz Josef based sculptor Hannah Kidd predominantly crafts and welds sculptural creations from steel rod and corrugated iron as a means to investigate people and the relationships they have with their surrounding environment. “Kidd’s works remind us we are New Zealanders and explore our relationships with each other and our environments”. 1

Peata Larkin

Peata Larkin’s language is that of geometric abstraction and pattern deeply informed by Maori culture.

Karl Maughan

Karl Maughan has been painting gardens since the mid-1980s and this accomplished concentration on subject has made him a nationally and internationally recognised and recognisable New Zealand artist. Maughan has been exhibiting with Milford Galleries Dunedin since 1993.

Mary Mulholland

.“So rich is the colour in Mary Mulholland’s exhibition of flower paintings… that on entering the gallery you inhale in anticipation of the fragrance.” (1)

Geoffrey Notman

Geoffrey Notman’s paintings have a powerful sense of place and vernacular that is accurate, incisive as well as evocative and a distillation of a central and distinguishing aspect of New Zealand culture, politics and life.

Simon Ogden

Simon Ogden uses the colour and patterning of 'found' linoleum materials to make collages of sculptural presence. In ‘Impressions/Expressions (2006)’ a visual game is being played with the viewer. Ogden’s linoleum incisions provide negative detail allowing icons within the artwork to appear floating above the surface. The contradiction between innocence and sophistication is evident in Simon Ogden’s collages where he combines primitive perspective, hieroglyphics and found objects to create works of depth and intrigue. His work can also be seen as a naive discontinuous narrative referencing rock drawings or thoughts from a dreamed space that have become concrete.

Jenna Packer

Jenna Packer paints metaphorical and alternate histories commenting on journeys of discovery, evolution, the survival instinct of escape, fragility and the endless possibilities of life.

Neal Palmer

“Vividness, hyper-reality and sheer painterly skill… Brilliant technique…”1. –

John Parker

“I subscribe to the well rounded aesthetic ideal, I guess. All the things I do relate, they are all visual. They all concern the drama of reactions to shape and colour and arrangement.” John Parker works as a potter, set and costume designer and film critic. He draws no distinction between his interests. “The same themes flow through your work and the same processes of stylisation, fine-tuning and attention to detail apply.” (1)

Reuben Paterson

The glitter paintings of Reuben Paterson are extremely seductive, attracting viewers like magpies to shiny objects of promise. They hint at the ideas of beauty as a magnet for visual attraction. The sparkling glitter enables the artist to explore much more than merely the twinkling light qualities of the material. Its intrinsic character transcends the everyday, the mundane or the worldly, and now implies the celestial, the spiritual and the celebratory. (1)

Mike Petre

“My work is a personal response to memory and experiences associated with spending a large part of my life immersed in rural environments. My paintings are not an attempt to elevate, idealise or romanticise the rural, but rather a means of exploring the notion of what it is, and what it means to be a ‘local’, and developing a visual language to convey this. New Zealand has a rich and varied history of landscape painting yet I feel little has been attempted within the visual arts to explore issues of localised rural experience and landscape. Historically New Zealand landscape painting depicts ‘visiting the landscape’ with all its implied transferral of ‘Urban Experience’, - a romanticising experience.” (1)

Lorraine Rastorfer

Lorraine Rastorfer’s “works are characterized by a remarkable finesse, superb restraint, a restricted but articulate palette, softness of presence and command of the viewers eye”. (1) Her paintings utilize reflective surfaces, metallic presence and authoritative brushstrokes, integrating texture, pattern and the notion of repetition to create an ambiguous and illusory depiction of space.

Elizabeth Rees

Rees’ works explore the relationship between the body and mind and the environment in which we exist. Within her recent canvases she depicts the body in motion, moving toward or away from the unknown. “What are we fleeing from? What are we hurtling towards? What are we leaving behind and what do we hope to find? Each to one's own path and motivation we are in motion in the passage of life and time. Each painting freeze-frames a moment; the last step has gone and the next is yet to come.” (1)

Ann Robinson

Ann Robinson is an internationally significant glass artist and an acclaimed innovator who has been at the forefront of the extraordinary achievement of New Zealand glass.

Peter James Smith

Peter James Smith: “My work gathers together phases of scientific endeavour by placing data, text, references and graffiti across an illusionistic visual field. The gathering of data, codes, signifiers and histories into a current woven text is a particularly post-modern stance. It provides the artist with a curator’s brief. It sits well with the scientist who creates new work by formally referencing the pioneering work of others in the field. In this sense scientists don’t ‘appropriate’, they build on the past.” (1)

Gary Waldrom

Gary Waldrom produces in his painting an alternate reality that is uncannily close to real life. His work explores themes of isolation, dream, intuitive processes and the human condition. Born and raised in Waipawa in the Hawkes Bay, he has been painting since an early age.