Exhibitions

Auckland

Billy McQueen Archive 02

Föenander Gallery 5–25 March KYLA MACKENZIE This, Billy McQueen’s third solo exhibition, stems from his family archive of photographs and follows on from Archive at Antoinette Godkin Gallery in 2018. McQueen (Ngati Manawa), a former print technician, graduated in 2015 with a MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts. With the memory of printmaking, he developed a cohesive, distinctive muted palette, a tendency towards textured, layered surfaces, indeterminate figuration, and abstract imagery. This show signals McQueen’s move towards a brighter palette and greater viscosity. Pale paintings like L.McGreggor reflect his earlier use of muted tones, while in several other canvases thickly applied heightened colour literally overlaps this earlier, more sparing impulse.

The artist’s subjects do not just serve as pictorial armature for plastic experiment; they reference family and friends, and the ancestral sites of the Kaingaroa Plains.

McQueen’s figures, such as those in and , have inaccessible eyes, in some cases as if sun has bleached out detail in a photograph, and abstraction has reduced it more. Other figures are turned away from the viewer as in the deftly composed which seems directly painted with less textural play than other examples. Two figures, perhaps both female, are turned away, heightening a sense of mystery for the viewer. nods to the Matisse and Gauguin-inflected works of Scottish artist Peter Doig, whose work.