Utterly spectacular book features Shane Cotton's Art

“Stepping up to the painting, I found myself on the edge of a blue-black void, a space whose colours suggested some time beyond day or night...”

For two decades Shane Cotton (ONZM, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) has been one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed painters. His works of the 1990s, with their sepia-toned landscapes and intricate inscriptions, played a pivotal part in that decade’s debates about place, belonging and bicultural identity. In the mid 2000s, however, Cotton headed in an unexpected direction: skywards. Employing a sombre new palette of blue and black, he painted the first in what would become a major series of skyscapes—vast, nocturnal spaces where birds speed and plummet. From these spare and vertiginous beginnings, Cotton’s skyscapes have become increasingly complex and provocative, incorporating ragged skywriting and a host of charged images.

The Hanging Sky brings together highlights from this period with four distinctive responses to the assembled works. New York essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger offers a poetic meditation on what he calls 'the ghosts of birds' in Cotton's paintings. Christchurch Art Gallery senior curator Justin Paton plots his own encounter with Cotton across six years in which the artist was constantly 'finding space'. Australian curator Geraldine Barlow confronts the haunting role of Toi moko—tattooed Māori heads—in the paintings and in her own past. And Institute of Modern Art director Robert Leonard makes a provocative case for Cotton as a cultural surrealist exploring 'the treachery of images'.

  

Justin Paton is Senior Curator at Christchurch Art Gallery. A widely published art critic and author of books on artists including Julia Morison, Jude Rae and Ricky Swallow, he is best known for his acclaimed book How to Look at a Painting (2005). In 2011 his exhibitions included De-Building at Christchurch Art Gallery and Unguided Tours at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2012 Paton was Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton, France. He is lead curator of Christchurch Art Gallery’s Outer Spaces programme and curator of Bill Culbert: Front Door Out Back, New Zealand’s presentation at the 55th Venice Biennale.

Publisher Christchurch Art Gallery,

Editor Justin Paton - with Eliot Weinberger, Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow & Robert Leonard

Hardback - $120.00

This is an absolutely superb, truly impressive piece of publishing and I offer my warmest congratulations to all concerned. The book is a joy to hold, view and read, taonga no less.