In 1983 Paul Hartigan was included in the group show New Image, curated by Francis Pound at the Auckland Art Gallery. This exhibition brought together several New Zealand artists including Dick Frizzell and Richard Killeen who were committed to new styles and themes in art. Since studying at Elam School of Fine art in the early 1970’s Paul Hartigan has been committed to extending the boundaries of art, creating ‘new images’ initially inspired by the Pop movement in the US.
Paul Hartigan did not just appropriate from popular culture, he was emersed in it through his commercial design practice. Post art-school and living in Melbourne in the early 1970s, Hartigan trained in commercial screenprinting. On returning to Auckland in 1974, he established ‘Snake Studios’, a hand-print studio inspired by Warhol’s Factory, producing silk-screened fabrics, t-shirts and artist prints. This multi-disciplinary practice enabled him to embrace mediums typically relegated to the commercial sector. Neon, vinyl and enamel paint can all be found in his artistic tool-kit.
Hartigan adopted domestic enamels early in his painting career, a medium that further pressed Pop-art ideals of deconstructing the separation between art and the everyday. Subjects were inspired by advertising, comic heroes, tattoo and neon, with colours and line as bold and brash as the subjects they were drawn from.
When Paul Hartigan first arrived in Auckland in 1968, Newmarket’s main strip was ablaze with neon signage, a visual overload of light and colour that captivated the young artist. By 1980 Hartigan was constructing art out of neon tubing, developing a distinct visual language of abstract shapes which at once have high art connotations of contemporary hieroglyphs and automatic drawing, and the low art schoolyard meanderings of pencil-case scrawling and graffiti. Described by John Hurrell in Art New Zealand as ‘tumbling whorls of hazy chroma’, the artist’s more recent neons protrude from the wall with sculptural presence and the complexity of shape adds a depth and delicacy to the work not often associated with the medium.
An important figure in the contemporary art movement in New Zealand, Paul Hartigan is represented in major national collections including Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery, the Sarjeant and Govett-Brewster Art Galleries. His large-scale neon installations can be seen on permanent display at the University of Auckland (Colony, 2004) and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (Pathfinder, 1997).
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