Nigel Brown Artist | Artis Gallery

Nigel Brown has been represented by ARTIS Gallery since 2014.

Over the past forty years, Brown has established a reputation as one of the most important figurative artists in New Zealand. His distinctive visual language uses recurring motifs, stylistic features and symbolic characters, which are strongly grounded in a New Zealand vernacular.

Throughout his career Brown has received numerous awards, including; the QEII Arts Council Grant (1981), Inaugural Artists to Antarctica Award (1998) and in 2004 was awarded the ONZM

for services to painting and printmaking.

Brown enrolled at Elam School of Art in 1968 where he was taught by Pat Hanly, Colin McCahon, Garth Tapper, Greer Twiss and Robert Ellis. McCahon encouraged Brown to pursue his own personal vision and utilize distinct motifs in his work. Brown graduated in 1971 and began his

full time artist career the following year in 1972. He cemented his reputation as an artist in 1977 with his highly acclaimed Lemon Tree series (1977).

Brown has a systematic and workmanlike approach to painting. He works from an initial concept, which is the result of reading and extensive research. Sketches, photographs and other sources are used as a visual back up to develop specifics, leading to works on paper and trial paintings. The artist works from a gesso ground on which he applies a base coat of yellow ochre. The main ideas and words of each work are then sketched in by brush, followed by the initial lines and tones, and the first of five layers or more of paint.

Brown directly and selectively employs history, literature and politics as devices in his artworks. He also uses words in his paintings, a technique that was heavily influenced by the English poet and painter William Blake. At Elam, McCahon suggested that Brown contain his text in a border or boundary, a technique he still employs today.

Long recognised as an expert on 'we Pākehā' and what makes us tick, Nigel Brown has been described as a magpie. And so it is in this exhibition, 'Cells of Human'. As in so many other of his exhibitions he not only draws on a wide range of genres and colours, but focuses on the boundaries we create to manage our world. Film, literature, comics, pop art, occasional echoes of Māori design - all are grist to his mill. He also cross-references himself and others, re-investigates, and revisits, conscious always of the complicated relationship between words, the things they purport to describe, and the visual world of planes, colours and dimensions. Sign, signified, and signifier are interrogated together. He has always been interested in change both in our world and in the past, which is how I first became interested in his work. In this exhibition change is at the forefront.