FONG, Luise;

Minor (triptych)

1994
Ink, acrylic and gouache on 3 wooden doors
2040 x 870mm (each piece); 2040 x 2610mm (overall)

Luise Fong won the Premier Award at the Visa Gold Art Award with this work, Minor. The triptych is characteristic of her practice in that it explores diaphanous surfaces, possibly as a kind of overhang from her training as a textile designer. Her paintings of this period were made on doors and thus have a familiar scale in relationship to the body. The doors are covered with blots, stains, and holes, which never let the eye rest and which have a distinctive fluidity, deliberately viewed as feminine in sharp contrast to the hard-edge abstraction of her male predecessors. Fong makes unashamedly beautiful surfaces, in this case in a minor key, sombre and brooding. The musical title legitimises an emotional response in the viewer.

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Exhibition History

Visa Gold Art Award, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 13 August to 5 September 1994

Illustrated

Gregory Burke (ed.), Cultural Safety: Contemporary Art from New Zealand (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Kunstverein; Te Whanganui-a-Tara: City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, 1995), 51.

Provenance

1994–
Fletcher Trust Collection, purchased September 1994

The Fletcher Trust Collection is one of the largest curated private collections of Aotearoa art. The Trust makes works available online as well as via exhibitions initiated by public art institutions and by the Trust itself.

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