Brendan Burns
Aotearoa - A Brighter Light
31 MAY - 19 JUNE
After many delays, the first exhibition from Brendan Burns has finally opened in ARTIS Gallery.
Brendan Burns came to New Zealand from Wales in 2020 to complete a 9 week residency at Earthskin in Piha, Auckland. This residency was to conclude with an exhibition in ARTIS Gallery in April of that year. However, due to the outbreak of COVID-19 Brendan had to immediately return to Wales prior to New Zealand lockdown in March 2020.
“Artists consistently talk about ‘light’. Indeed, it has always been important within my paintings; the interplay between reflected and refracted light which helps the ambiguous relationships of the figurative and abstract, microcosm and macrocosm. Light which helps define the difference between pictorial space and sensory space; colour as materiality in its reference juxtaposed with colour as sensation and emotion.”

"All my work has endeavoured to present the clarity, yet simultaneous abstraction of a ‘peripheral’ experience: the afterimage burnt onto the retina, something which is both precise yet ambiguous, fixed yet transitory, permanent yet ephemeral. I aspire to celebrate a stone’s ability to seep absorbed light, almost as liquid colour when dusk sets. These works ‘re-present’ that connection with our natural world, the simplest and fundamental of human experiences: they give one time to breath. They refract ‘awareness’ itself."