Gavin Hipkins

Geometric yet organic, the blobs resemble at once alien pods, igloos, pup tents, breasts, the curvaceous hills and mud pools of his native New Zealand, and bacteria. The psychedelic colour scheme is both candied and toxic; we could be staring into a lava lamp, perhaps furthering a boudoir subtext. There’s no reference for scale. The work could imply a macroscopic view (an imperialist invasion, a commune of hippie drop-outs in their geodesic domes, or a high-tech off-world encampment on a weirdly hued planet) or a microscopic one.

Sitting between sculpture, painting, and photography, I like to think of these new works as ‘kinder monuments’ — a reference to their ambiguous scale, and the occupation of the field plane by massively enlarged brutalist wooden blocks.

In late 2018 Hipkins extended his experimentation in this body of work in the dealer gallery exhibition Block Units, including an 80-image slide projection of photographs of pairs of painted blocks arranged in sculptural formations alongside framed photographs.

In 2018 Hipkins produced The Precinct for the 9th iteration of the Queensland Art Gallery's Asia Pacific Triennial. The film, set along the Brisbane River, uses text drawn from the first published novel set in Brisbane, Dr Thomas Pennington Lucas's The Curse and its Cure (1894).

Hipkins has exhibited in New Zealand and internationally for over 20 years. In 2017 The Dowse Art Museum staged a major survey exhibition of his work, Gavin Hipkins: The Domain, which included works from the past 25 years stretching back to his time at Elam School of Fine Arts and including new commissions produced in 2017.

Hipkins' recent film work, New Age (2016), is set at Avebury and calls on the tradition of spirit photography. The film premiered in 2016 at the International Competition at the 62nd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

In 2016 Hipkins was invited to make a work as part of a commissioned set of moving image responses to the writing of New Zealand artist Julian Dashper. Hipkins' resulting work New World melded extracts from an 1849 report encouraging immigration to North-East Texas, title-cards resembling abstract paintings, Google Earth footage and reproductions of plates drawn from the 1876 book American Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil as well as solarised reproductions of images from early 1980s copies of National Geographic and Penthouse.

In 2013 Hipkins returned to Chandigarh to photograph and film for two works: Leisure Valley (a 46-part photo-installation) and The Port, a short film. The 46 photos in Leisure Valley reflect the 46 sectors in Le Corbusier's original plan for Chandigarh; The Port combines images of the 18th century architectural instruments Jantar Mantars with imagery drawn from the New Zealand landscape, and suburban architecture from Stonefields, a new Auckland residential development, accompanied by audio of passages being read from H.G. Wells' novella The Time Machine. The two were shown together in 2014 as Leisure Valley at St Paul St Gallery in Auckland.

Hipkins began making experimental short films in 2010. In 2014, his first feature film Erewhon - based on Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, Or Over the Range - premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival and the Edinburgh Art Festival.

A related work, the 12-piece The Terrace (2008) is held in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Hipkins continued work on The Sanctuary during his time on an artist residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York in 2006.

This work, made up of 100 individual c-type prints of painted and glued-together hemispherical polystyrene blobs, was made for the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale and then re-shown at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland. Curator Robert Leonard wrote of this work:

This site-specific work was created at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. 2000 small c-type prints depicting strands of liquorice were laid like raceway circuits around three gallery walls, accompanied by one large photograph of a skeletal Indian sculpture, Eurasia, and a video work showing plates of milk being slowly dyed blue or red with jelly crystals. The installation was produced when Hipkins was in Dunedin as part of the gallery's Visiting Artist Programme.

In 1997, Hipkins visited Chandigarh in Northern India. The city contains many buildings by architect Le Corbusier, and his symbolic structure, the Open Hand Monument, a metal weather vane that rotates in the wind. The Trench is a slide show of 80 photographs taken of the monument, each one double-exposed with an image of a rose from Chandigarh’s rose garden. As the images of the hand form rotate in the photographs, the roses move from red to orange to yellow.

Hipkins began working with the format he used for a number of works, collectively known as Falls, while he was still at art school. These works are made up of 'vertical strip[s] of machine prints, which present the content of a single roll of film—a session of almost identical shots of one subject from more or less the same angle, like a ‘shot’ of film footage'. Zerfall Wellington 1 March 1996 (1996) is made up of images from a firework display. Falls, Zerfall (1997–1998), shown at the 1998 Biennale of Sydney, consisted of images of circular objects usually found in kitchens and bathrooms. A set of seven Falls, titled The Gulf, mixed images collected from pornography websites (each work was titled after a genre: Teen, Blonde, Mature, Asian, Latina, Ebony, and Red-headed) mixed with stereotypical imagery from travel advertising, photos of small accessories (buttons, ribbon) and neutral background textures.

Hipkins completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 1992 and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 2002.

In this series, Hipkins used ready-made images, sourced from kitschy offset prints made in Switzerland in 1978, which he bought in West Auckland. He reproduced the images as large rectangular wallpaper murals (2160 x 4800 mm each).

Gavin John Hipkins (born 1968 in Auckland) is a New Zealand photographer and film-maker, and Associate Professor at Elam School of Fine Arts, at the University of Auckland.

The Bible Studies (New Testament) works were first shown at the Adam Art Gallery and then re-presented at Starkwhite Gallery in Auckland. Continuing the methods he used in Empire and Second Empire, the large-format c-type prints each feature a detail of an image appropriated from a 1968 illustrated children's bible, overlaid with an embroidered patch bearing a two or three-word phrase from Goethe's play Faust.

In Empire, Hipkins first used the method of taking scans he made of colour plates in books and then overlaying them with an embroidered patches and decals bought from markets and music stores. Hipkins selected his images from children's Commonwealth and Empire annuals from the 1950s. He worked on these series over the summer of 2007/2008 on his McCahon House residency, and showed Second Empire at the Lopdell House Gallery.