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JOHN REYNOLDS
2006 Laureate
Visual Artist
John has featured in many key exhibitions and publications on contemporary New Zealand art, has shown widely throughout the country, and been commissioned to produce projects for a wide range of New Zealand galleries, becoming known as one of New Zealand's foremost painters and printmakers.
Born in 1956, John received a BFA from Elam in 1978 and began exhibiting in 1980. He has based himself in Auckland throughout his entire career.
He began his career painting large abstract colourfields, slowly moving into structural text-based imagery. His paintings are rich with literary, religious, arthistorical and architectural allusions, frequently using both everyday and epic references. His works range in scale from works on postcards and stamps to a 2 x 12 metre painting, Hope Street, with his latest large work Clouds a feature work at the 2006 Zones of Contact Sydney Biennale. The work is made up of "New Zealandisms" taken from the Harry Orsman Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English, which John has painted in metallic silver on 7,073 primed canvasses. These are hung randomly on the feature wall in the entrance hall of the National Gallery of New South Wales.
Allan Smith, Senior Lecturer Elam School of Fine Arts, once described John's work as "intoxicated, indecorous, hedonistic, romantic, sublime, mythopoetic, dithyrambic, epic and visionary, excessive and cloying, satanic and heavenly, restless; his compositions as turbulent, angelic, chromatic, shimmering and exfoliating, internally stressed, externally unhinged, and ornamental; his iconography as reminiscent of blood vessels and hallucinated architecture"!
John won the Montana Lindauer Award in 1988, received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Arts Council of New Zealand in 1993, won the Visa Gold Art Award in 1994 and was a finalist in the 2002 Walters Art Prize. He has collaborated with the painter Ralph Hotere (Icon) on the multi-panelled Winter Chrysanthemums, 1995 and also with the poet Leigh Davis on his boxed set of poems The Book of Hours, 2002.
In 2007 John was the focus of Shirley Horrocks' documentary Questions for Mr Reynolds, which screened at the Film Festival as well as on TV One’s Artsville. He is a finalist in the 2008 Walters Prize.
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Cloud, 2006
Photo by Patrick Reynolds
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