SHANE COTTON

Born 1964 in Upper Hutt, New Zealand. Lives and works in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Shane Cotton, Coloured Dirt, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 180 cm. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Shane Cotton is one of New Zealand’s best-known contemporary painters. The intersection of his own Ngāpuhi and Pakeha (New Zealand European) heritage is a running theme in his work. His paintings blend imagery and iconography from traditional and contemporary sources to reflect on contemporary experience.

Cotton’s early paintings were abstract; however, during the 1990s, he shifted to a representational style, influenced by the Māori figurative traditions that had emerged in New Zealand in the late nineteenth century. He has continued to use symbols and images that refer to significant events and issues in New Zealand’s history, such as those related to land ownership and the preservation of Māori culture, often addressing them in an oblique fashion, combining popular culture, references to art history, and the traditional stories of New Zealand to create ambiguous pictorial and political constructions. His paintings simultaneously suggest European Old Masters and traditional Māori art but he does not offer to mediate between the two spheres, representing both as equivalences. In this way, Cotton’s work steers clear of institutionalised bicultural didactics, instead taking up a position of speculative contemporary aesthetic investigation.

Cotton’s earlier works were lighter and gentler, painted in light and warm tones. His more recent series, however, with dark backgrounds and calculated placement of images, suggest a darker divinatory system with an obscured and ominous forecast. In these works, the iconography appears devoid of context; symbols and pictorial representations float in black space or dark voids of blue. The pictorial architecture in these works is unstable – perhaps a reflection on current times.

By drawing on borrowed imagery to produce ambivalent narratives, Cotton produces contemporary echoes of the colonial aesthetics of early New Zealand art, which mixes traditional Māori arts with European influences. Through combinations of borrowed imagery from the West, Māori text, images of native New Zealand birds, target icons and upoko tuhituhi (decorated human heads), Cotton excavates periods of change and upheaval that have led to the present. Using bold, flat colours, often with a dark palette, his paintings provoke the viewer to make connections, looking from one image to another and considering the deep layers of history and iconography that inform contemporary experience in New Zealand.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2008 ‘Coloured Dirt’, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand
2007 ‘Red Shift’, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, Australia
2005 ‘Pararaiha’, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, Australia
2003–04 ‘Shane Cotton Survey 1993–2003’, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland; City Gallery Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
2003 ‘Shane Cotton: Paintings’, Sofa Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Art in the Contemporary Pacific 2009’, Kaohsiung Art Museum, Taiwan
2007 ‘Turbulence’, 3rd Auckland Triennial 2007, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand
2007 ‘Dateline – Contemporary art from the Pacific’, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany
2006 ‘Nuclear Reactions’, Caja de Burgos Art Centre, Burgos, Spain
2004 ‘Paradise Now? Contemporary Art from the Pacific’, Asian Society Museum, New York, USA

Selected Bibliography

Paco Barragan, Nuclear Reactions, Centro De Arte Caja De Burgos, Burgos, 2006
Blair French, ‘Painting Presence’, Four Times Painting, Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Wellington, 2007
Laura Murray Cree (ed.), Twenty: Sherman Galleries 1986–2006, Craftsman House, Melbourne, 2006
Oriwa Soliomon and Huhana Smith (eds), Taiawhio II: Contemporary Māori Artists, Te Papa Press, Wellington, 2007
Lara Strongman (ed.), Shane Cotton, City Gallery Wellington and Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2004