a colour has many faces

Salome Tanuvasa, Janna Van Hasselt, Poppy Lekner, Lily Custance, Polly Gilroy

Curated by Polly Gilroy

PG gallery192, Christchurch

30 May-30 June, 2023

Artists use colour to make you feel or see something, however a single colour can be translated in many ways. There is an undeniable instability to colour. Although, on a surface level hues appear stable, as relationships form between colours and their environment we find they endlessly transform. They are as variable as light.

A colour has many faces brings together five female artists from across Aotearoa with diverse artistic practices. Colour plays a pivotal role within each artist’s work and is explored through their unique visual language, dissecting the sensorial potential of surface and shape through bold abstraction.

Exploring materiality in a different realm to Custance, Tanuvasa and Lekner, Polly Gilroy embraces the point of transition between sculpture and painting, binding the two through multi-faceted structures. Gilroy’s silk stretched works present carefully considered colour pairings within her complex cross bar compositions. Hues are manipulated through opacity shifts and shade transitions. Demarcating space, her works often bring the support structures into the formal composition and encourages viewers to look through and beyond.
       Gilroy’s works were made with an element of response to the other exhibiting artists. Mimicking shape, line and colour, a conversation is opened up with Lily Custance and Janna van Hasselt’s pieces. Her large green work Oscillation considers the mirroring found in Custance’s works and explores the asymmetrical, reflective skews that occur with perspective change, whilst also imitating colour gradients to create an illusion of depth.