Selina Foote is a visual artist from New Zealand whose work frequently cites art history, including 19th century impressionists such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. These citations often act as launching pads for Foote's own explorations as she delves beyond existing tropes. The artist's work both skims from and festoons these impressionist refrains with a more contemporary visual grammar.
Read MoreFoote graduated with a MFA (2011) and a BFA (2008) from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. In 2011, Foote's work was shown in Prospect: New Zealand Art Now, a group show in which her gravitation towards impressionist geometries was evident. For example, her original composition Untitled (Asterié) (2011) in many ways is a delicate riff on Edward Poynter's Asterié (1904).
Foote has had several exhibitions at Two Rooms Gallery in Auckland, by whom she is currently represented. The 2014 exhibition ray, for example, saw Foote expanding on abstracted motifs inspired by Manet and Rembrandt. In the artist's own words, her focus was to glean 'information from a reproduction image of a historical painting'—a visual commentary on the mediation of original works by photography—as well as redeeming the act of reproduction as something conceptually crucial to the painting process as a whole.
Continuing this exercise of working from reproductions in the 2017 exhibition The Pink Morning, Foote used more traditional or figurative works as source material, developing new abstractions from these in such a way that the original still haunts Foote's compositions. As well as folding a theme of domestic femininity into Foote's geometrics, these works saw the progression of an existing interest in the ways in which art history informs contemporary practice, even when one is working outside the existing 'rules' of earlier painting.
Diving even deeper into abstractions wrought from historic source material, the 2019 group exhibition sisters, daughters saw the artist gleaning from female impressionists Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Eva Gonzales. Here, the exploration went beyond merely excavating the influence of the past, but also touched on the frequent camouflaging or even erasure of women artists from the art historical canon. By discarding and amplifying certain colours and lines from her sources, Foote creates novel compositions which retain their structural traces while still presenting as decidedly contemporary.
Selina Foote's solo shows include A Visitor, Two Rooms, Auckland (2021); sisters, daughters, Two Rooms, Auckland (2019); The Pink Morning, Two Rooms, Auckland (2017); ray, Two Rooms, Auckland (2014); Network, Tristian Koenig, Melbourne (2013); and Tuileries, Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland (2012).
Selina Foote's work has also featured in group exhibitions, including Model Painting, Two Rooms, Auckland (2017); Materialised, Two Rooms, Auckland (2017); Over Under Sideways Down, Two Rooms, Auckland (2015); and The Smoothing of Things, Two Rooms, Auckland (2015).
Works by Foote are included in the collections of the Chartwell Trust and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Samuel Te Kani | Ocula | 2021
