This recent body of work from Ōtepoti Dunedin-based painter Michael Greaves are a continuation of the last four years of his practice, a period bound up with the COVID pandemic, which altered the parameters of everyday encounters, resulting in new responses in the work he produced.

An artist preoccupied with the philosophical questions surrounding painting and its purpose in the 21st century, Greaves tests how memories and ideas about the things of the world can be translated compellingly onto the painted surface. Painting for him is a seductive contradiction.

This body of work draws upon the story of Icarus and Daedalus, and is among other things analogous to both the restricted conditions of the father and son in the story, as it is to using the artifice of imitation wings to approximate a bird in flight. The risk for painting is that it ‘flies too close to the sun’ in its attempt to give an image to the abstract idea; one mark too many in this unattainable pursuit could cause the work to come crashing down. To Greaves, this is both paintings’ predicament and its allure.

Join us for the opening of this exhibition on Saturday 14 December at 6pm. This will coincide with the opening of Wesley John Fourie’s exhibition and with his kiss i became a braided river.

Catalogue

Main Image: Michael Greaves, Indicative physical qualities of the phenomenal world (detail), 2023, airbrush, acrylic and oil on linen.

Left Image: Michael Greaves, Cartoonish ruins of a once fragile moment, memory returning to its most savage indication, 2023, airbrush and acrylic on linen. (Private collection, Dunedin).