Shane Cotton Solo Exhibition Opens in Hong Kong

One of New Zealand’s foremost contemporary artists, Shane Cotton will present “The Voyage Out”, a solo exhibition of new works on at Hong Kong’s Rossi Rossi gallery until 27 December.

The gallery explains: “Part of a hugely influential generation of contemporary Maori artists, Cotton has played a central role in shaping New Zealand’s postcolonial discourse. In ‘The Voyage Out’, he offers twenty new works on paper, many of which deploy his signature forms of the past few years: ambiguous texts; birds being stretched and warped through space; coloured dots and lines that simultaneously censor his images and create spatial depth; and, most contentiously, mokomokai — preserved Maori heads that were traded in the nineteenth century.

“The artist also wears his influences openly — like [British painter Ben] Nicholson, he borrows freely from American painter and photographer Ed Ruscha, American conceptual artist John Baldessari and New Zealand’s greatest painter, Colin McCahon.

“But Cotton’s works create a unique vision: a collision of colonial traumas, histories of modernism, contemporary reflections on ideas of ‘place’ and the nature of our existence.”

In 2008, Cotton received the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award, and in 2012 he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to the visual arts.

He was born in Lower Hutt in 1964.