GAVIN HIPKINS

Camera Work is the artist’s fifteenth one-person exhibition with the gallery.

Early in his career, New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins was described by fellow artist Giovanni Intra as a ‘tourist of photography’. This epithet has been used repeatedly by commentators on Hipkins’ work to describe two intertwined aspects of his practice. As art historian Peter Brunt puts it, Hipkins is a constantly travelling photographer, ‘an iconographer of desire, travel, time and ... modern communities’, and a tourist within the medium, ‘a great manipulator of the photographic artifact itself’. Working with avant-garde methods and modes, including camera-less (photogram) processes, Camera Work extends Hipkins’ interrogation of how images create meaning across evolving technologies. Using repetition and fragmentation as core strategies in his mahi toi, Hipkins’ latest project synthesizes digital and analogue photographies to shape an uniquely hybrid visual language.

About the Artist:

Gavin Hipkins is an award-winning Tamaki Makaurau-based artist who works with photography and moving image. His work has been exhibited widely over the last three decades, including recent group exhibitions at Zabludowicz Collection, London (2022); Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland (2021); Grand Palais, Paris (2020). His video installation The Precinct (2018) was commissioned by Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) for the 2018 Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art (APT 9). He represented New Zealand at the 1998 Sydney Biennale and the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale. His work is included in major public and private collections, including the Auckland Art Gallery, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Christchurch Art Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, and George Eastman Museum of Photography and Film, New York.