In this exhibition, paint itself is the star. Paint / material makes meaning. Narrative may exist but, in stark contrast to figurative painting, it’s not the primary driver for any of these artists. These artists are interested in exploring and pushing at the boundaries of what paint, and painting, can do. Paint itself is allowed to perform – its physicality is foregrounded - even though the artist is in the driver’s seat and underpinning that physicality with an intellectual engagement with art history that takes the work beyond the purely visual. There’s a sense of playing, having fun.

Of course, in the 21st century, the strict mid-century rules of abstraction’s heyday –beliefs about the flatness and two-dimensionality of painting and truth to materials - no longer apply. This exhibition Paint presents a set of ideas around the materiality of painting and its links to the world via suggestion rather than representation - ideas around three-dimensionality, in-betweenness, transparency, edges, slipperiness, mobility.

Bartley & Company Art is delighted to showcase nine artists working in this way and to include and introduce four artists who have not previously shown with the gallery.


Helen Calder: Concern with colour, form and how paint operates in space when freed of its traditional support on canvas and stretcher is at the heart of Calder’s practice. Here paint pushes at its limits to adopt the terrain of sculpture. Based in Christchurch, Calder has an MFA from the University of Canterbury. Her work is held in private and public collections.

Catherine Clayton-Smith: In Clayton-Smith’s work, paint is a vehicle to record experience in a constructed personal visual language where form, drawn from memory and observation, teeters into abstraction. Raised in Christchurch, she moved to Sydney soon after the earthquakes and completed a BFA at the National Art School in Sydney where she continues to live and exhibit.

Hamish Coleman: The artist’s signature use of interference oil paint, which changes colour in response to viewing angle, challenges the notion of paint and painting as static. A sense of the elusive is evoked as image slips and shift to present transience as the subject. Wellington based, Coleman has a BFA (Hons) from the University of Canterbury, In 2021, he had his first public gallery solo exhibition at the Ashburton Art Gallery.

Cat Fooks: There’s something almost archeological in her paintings with layers of clashing and congealing colour built up and sculpted to create form and then depth. In these luscious and exuberant works with a sensibility of playdough baroque, indeterminate objects are buried or rise to sit on the surface as jewels or heraldic emblems. Auckland based, Fooks has a Bachelor of Visual Communications, majoring in painting from Unitec.



Monique Lacey: Crushed carboard boxes provide three-dimensional surfaces which are embellished with plaster, paint, resin, rubber, wax, varnish and pigments to create objects which are at once humble and opulent. The result, a beautiful play with, and disruption of, the ideas associated with minimalism, the use of found objects and abstract painting. Lacey has an MFA (First Class Honours) from the  Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design and is represented in Australian and the US as well as New Zealand.

Marie Le Lievre: Paint poured, wet layer on wet, is, in Le Lievre’s work, allowed to dance and perform within constraints conceived by the choreographer artist. Deep abstract pools of oil speak to the world from a strangely an inbetween, liminal space. Le Lievre has an MFA (with Distinction) from the University of Canterbury and has exhibited in Australia and France as well as New Zealand.

Miranda Parkes: Best known for her scrunched ‘voluptuous’ canvases, Parkes works across a range of substrates including canvas, paper, timber pallets, plastic tiles, but never stretched flat canvas. Painting itself, rather than the surface on which paint sits, has primacy, and colour - often glorious fluro colours, golds and silvers - is foregrounded. She has an MFA from the University of Canterbury, an impressive exhibition history and has won numerous awards and residencies.

Stacey Turner: Painting and drawing on a variey of surfaces, Turner is interested in how simple gestures evoke other artistic practices such as comic books, Japanese woodblock printing, street graffiti and carving. Recently returned to New Zealand and artmaking. Turner has a BFA (Hons) from Canterbury University.

Rebecca Wallis: Transparency is not a word usually associated with paint but with silk as her sometimes wayward surface, Wallis works to conceal and reveal the components of painting, investigating what has been described as 'beyond, behind and beneath'. She completed a Master’s in Visual Arts at Goldsmiths College, London following a Diploma of Art (Hons) at the Dunedin School of Art and lives between London and Auckland.