Angela Tiatia Shows at Massive Matisse Exhibition

In the accompanying exhibition to the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ new blockbuster exhibition Matisse: Life & Spirit, contemporary artists, including New Zealander Angela Tiatia, re-contextualise, challenge and complicate the modern master’s art and legacy, Kathleen Linn writes in a story for The Guardian.

As part of Matisse Alive, Tiatia presents, The Pearl (2021), a mesmerising video work the result of a recent research trip to Tahiti. Tiatia is a Sydney-based artist, born in New Zealand with Samoan heritage.

In The Pearl, bright candy pink plastic clam shells open and close while hyperreal, computer-generated water foams and flows over them to a crescendo of drums. Tiatia retells the classical myth of the birth of Venus, taking Matisse’s own Venus in a shell (1930) as her starting point.

“[Tiatia is] wanting to address the position of artists and others voyaging to the Pacific and looking at the female body in one way … She is speaking about it from a very contemporary position – the capacity to be sexual, vital … and inhabit the world without the constraints of the colonial view of the Pacific,” co-curator Jackie Dunn says.

Matisse: Life & Spirit Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, Paris is on until 13 March 2022.

Original article by Kathleen Linn, The Guardian, November 26, 2021.

Photo by Diana Panuccio/AGNSW.