Michael Lett is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Julian Dashper from the late 1980s. This was a period of intense and playful experimentation for Dashper that marks the transition in his work from gestural abstraction to conceptual minimalism.
The major work
Untitled (Slides 46-65) spans much of the gallery space, consisting of a single row of A4 sleeves containing 35mm slides, each elegantly suspended just proud of the wall. These chronologically arranged slides are the visual archive of Dashper's practice between 1980-1990. In a pre-digital world slide packs were an artist's lifeline, being the literal source of slide show presentations to curators and potential dealers. Dashper's slides from this period depict what had largely been a painting-based practice with an overriding concern for gesture and materiality, and trace the beginnings of a change in his thinking towards the latter years of the collection.
By presenting this image archive as a work in its own right, Dashper asserts many of the fundamental conceptual concerns that would come to govern his practice for the next decade.
Untitled (Slides 46-65) addresses the business of being an artist, the distribution and flow of images along with the problems and solutions of being an artist operating at the geographical periphery of the art world, and re-presents commonplace artist materials using the formal visual language associated with minimalism.
The exhibition also includes a number of works on paper and canvas, predominantly completed in 1989. These whimsical paintings and drawings operate on the cusp between gestural mark making and the constraints applied to a more conceptual practice. These works employ a range of art supplies to generate a diversity of lines and marks. Rather than being heavily laboured, each line is taken straight from the edge of a French curve or spirograph, each splash or brush stroke equally bearing the unique mark associated with the process by which it was created.
Julian Dashper (1960-2009) was born in Auckland, New Zealand. Dashper graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland in 1982. His work has been exhibited widely in New Zealand, Australia, and Europe since 1980. Major New Zealand exhibitions include
Julian Dashper’s Greatest Hits, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1992;
The Big Bang Theory, Artspace, 1994;
The Twist, Waikato Museum of Art and History, 1998. In 2001 Dashper was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and was the artist in residence at the Donald Judd Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. In 2005 Sioux City Art Centre, Sioux City, Iowa mounted a survey exhibition of Dashper's work titled
Midwestern Unlike You and Me: New Zealand’s Julian Dashper.
Press release courtesy Michael Lett.