SÉRAPHINE PICK

For over three decades, Pick’s practice has been driven by a central tension between figuration and its collapse. Shifting between material dissolution and figural density, her paintings render the psychological world as a distinct frequency or near-audible tone. While previous works explored the unconscious impulses of social groups, cults and crowds, her new body of work examines the psychic landscape of individuals navigating a culture of image saturation.

This condition is explored through an ambivalent engagement with the history of art. Pick sets the recurring motif of bathers—an Arcadian theme popular among Modernist painters, suggestive of both immersion and cleansing—against titles drawn from a contemporary digital lexicon - Signal Overload, Offline, Mind Lag. In doing so, her work stages a complex dialogue with 20th century painting and its own legacies of image production.

Pick’s work has been the subject of major survey exhibitions such as White Noise, the Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt (2015) and Tell Me More, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (2009). Recent exhibitions include: Rider Instinct, Te Uru Waitakere, Auckland (2024), Pages of Mercury: Rita Angus, Andrew Beck, Séraphine Pick, City Gallery Wellington (2022) and Coloured Mud with Jaime Jenkins, Michael Lett (2021). Significant solo exhibitions include Looking like someone else, Pataka Museum, Porirua (2014) and Tell Me More, City Gallery, Wellington (2010). Works by Pick were included in the 1st Auckland Triennial in 2001. In 1999 Pick was a Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin and in 1995 she held the Rita Angus Cottage Residency in Wellington. The Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation Art Award was awarded to her in 1994. Pick graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury in 1987 and gained a Diploma of Teaching from Christchurch College of Education in 1991.