Touring about Canvases

Queenstown artist Alice Blackley runs Art Adventures, a tour company that takes visitors about the resort town’s galleries and studios. The Washington Post’s Michael Kaminer joins in for a day out. “A short drive took us to a small, bright gallery just outside downtown Queenstown, where pop-goth canvases by Damien Hirst shared the walls with clover-shaped abstractions by Max Gimblett, a legendary New Zealand artist now based in New York. Nadene Milne Gallery, as I learned, is one of Hirst’s global representatives. The exhibit, tantalisingly titled ‘The Beauty and Brutality of Fact,’ provided my first glimpse of a Queenstown that rarely makes the radar of adventure-craving tourists – a happening, heterogeneous art scene that’s uniquely New Zealand in its blend of hip and homey.”