Heather Straka's paintings and photographs subvert cultural tropes by recovering existing images and established motifs, often from cultures other than her own, and setting them in alternative contexts.
Read MoreBorn in 1972 in New Zealand, Straka attended the Elam School of Fine Arts until 1994 where she studied sculpture. The artist then spent five years in Paris working with artist Julia Morison after graduation, where she learned painting.
Proximity to European masterpieces during her time in Paris refocused Straka's practice. After returning to New Zealand, the artist held her first painting show in 1998, later completing an MFA at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 2000.
Heather Straka's paintings and photographs draw out cultural tropes and subvert historical scenes, often countering traditional expectations.
For the controversial 2005 exhibition at Jonathan Smart Gallery, Straka showed portraits of Māori chiefs rendered with saintly and demonic details, reconfigured from existing colonial paintings and images.
Recalling the missionary frenzy to locate godliness within Māori society, works like Jesus in Furs (2014), after Gottfried Lindauer's 1882 portrait of Ngati Maniapoto chief Rewi Maniapoto, adorned the leader with the sacred heart symbol at the chest.
Straka, who did not feel the need to ask for permission to use or represent these historical figures opened the debate as to who owns historical or archival images and whether representation, or history, can be redeemed through portraiture.
For the 2010 project The Asian, Straka commissioned 50 painters from the Chinese painting village Dafen to make copies of her painting The Asian (2009), a portrait of a young woman after the many Chinese commercial advertisement posters in the 1920s and 30s marketing products from the West.
All 51 paintings were exhibited at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in New Zealand, showing slight differences in detail and hue—here, raising questions of individuality and originality, countering the sacred hand of the artist.
The female sitters in Straka's 'Burqa' series may have their faces covered, but naked arms and torsos show tattooed imagery that point to lives lived outside the confines of the oppression commonly associated with the garment.
Rendered with soft hues on oval canvases after 18th and 19th century portraiture and miniatures, the 'Honeytrap' series showed young women from behind with the straps of their bras alone showing, evoking the alure of the female figure, while retaining an oddly solemn appearance.
In oils on cotton, like Honey Trap 8 in which the sitter's back contracts slightly as both the girl's arms stretch behind her, Straka relocates the figures in the series to a space of mundanity, where soft hues and hidden faces set aside all sexual charge to invite distance.
Staged in a dimly-lit, run-down interior modelled after a Germanic hotel from the 1930s, photographs in Memoria play with the notion of artifice to offer a dramatic narrative with a cast of characters enacting significant social and political events from the last decade.
Made to resemble film stills, images like The Scream II (2021), a young girl pouring red paint onto a white marble sculpture, pointed to the global collective action to remove monuments associated with patriarchy and colonialism.
Heather Straka is the 2002 recipient of the Pierce Lowe Award for Excellence in Painting.
Heather Straka's works have been shown widely in New Zealand and the UK.
Solo exhibitions include Page Galleries, Wellington (2021); Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch (2020); The Central Gallery, Christchurch (2017); Trish Clarke Gallery, Auckland (2017); Nadine Milne Gallery, Arrowtown (2016); Page Blackie Gallery, Wellington (2014); Southland Art Gallery & Museum, Invercargill (2012); and Rotorua Museum, Rotorua (2011).
Group exhibitions include Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch (2019); The Central, Christchurch (2017); Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2009); Wallace Art Awards Touring Exhibition (2008); and Touring Scholars Exhibition, Royal Overseas League, London and Edinburgh (2002).
The artist lives and works in Auckland.
Heather Straka's website can be found here, her Instagram here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2022
