WestFarbe

The Artists

• André Hemer
  

  André Hemer
  Vienna, Austria

  André Hemer is a New Zealand born, Vienna based painter. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury and PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Sydney. He coined the term 'new representation' to capture what his painting is doing with its integration of the digital with dynamic and sensuous and layering of spray paint, oil and acrylic with thick impasto.

   

  Hemer is represented by galleries in London, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, Sydney, Auckland and Wellington. 

   

  Web site
• Callum Innes
  

  Callum Innes
  Edinburgh, Scotland

  Callum Innes (b. 1962) studied at Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen and Edinburgh College of Art. Innes was short-listed for the Turner and Jerwood Prizes in 1995, won the prestigious NatWest Prize for Painting in 1998, and in 2002 was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting. He has exhibited internationally and his work is held in public collections worldwide including the Guggenheim, New York; National Gallery of Australia; TATE, London, and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. From Memory, a major exhibition of Callum Innes' work over the past 15 years, was shown at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2006 and toured Modern Art Oxford, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

  Web site
• Christine Reifenberger
  

  Christine Reifenberger
  Cologne, Germany

  Born in 1964 in Waldsassen, she lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Christine Reifenberger’s painting causes forms, contours and figurative lines to evolve. In her work, real phenomena metamorphose into poetic organisms. Her subjects become flows of consciousness that border on the supernatural and come close to the grotesque. In addition to her two-dimensional work on canvas and paper, the artist also uses this latter support to contort colour surfaces in space, transforming their state and that of their medium.

• Christoph Dahlhausen
  

  Christoph Dahlhausen
  Bonn, Germany

  Dahlhausen, born 1960, is a fine artist and curator based in Bonn (GER) and Melbourne (AUS). From 2013 to 2019, he was an Adjunct Professor of Fine Art at the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne. Dahlhausen runs Raum2810, a space for international contemporary art in Bonn. He has realised installations and exhibitions in Europe, America, South America, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. 

  
  The current exhibition WestFarbe started as a travelling exhibition in 2016 across three museum and art space venues in Germany, such as Raum2810 in Bonn, Museum Gelsenkirchen and Stadtmuseum Siegburg.

  
  WestFarbe is curated by Christoph Dahlhausen.

  Web site
• David Thomas
  

  David Thomas
  Melbourne, Australia

  David Thomas (born in Belfast N. Ireland) lives and works in Melbourne, Australia, he studied at Melbourne, Monash and RMIT Universities and holds a PhD from RMIT. His work explores the contemplative function of painting, photopainting and installation, in particular how new iterations of the monochrome tradition can address  the perception of time and space, complexity, impermanence, knowing and feeling. 

  
  His work is held in numerous private and public collections including: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; and the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand.

  He exhibits widely in Australia, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

   

  Web site
• Frank Piasta
  

  Frank Piasta
  Freiberg, Germany

  Frank Piasta began his studies under Gotthard Graubner at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, continuing, after 1996, at the Academy of Arts in Berlin under Kuno Gonschior. Encouraged by these two teachers, he followed their example of abandoning traditional panel painting. By employing unusual mediums and tools not yet grown stale by use, he was able to find his own independent artistic direction and to wrest new possibilities of expression from the métier. Contrasting with Graubner's voluminous expanses of color and Gonschior's thick application of paint, frequently without the use of the traditional brush, Frank Piasta creates works whose layered silicon lends them both a corporeal materiality and a nuanced coloring.

  Web site
• Helen Calder
  

  Helen Calder
  Christchurch, NZ

  Helen Calder is a painter based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, she holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury. Calder’s practice is a continual exploration of the properties and limits of paint as a material. She pushes the medium beyond its traditional form supported by canvas and panel, to create three-dimensional works that hang, puddle and fold both on and off the wall. 

  
  Calder has works held in New Zealand private and public collections including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Christchurch Art Gallery. She is represented by Nadene Milne Gallery (Arrowtown and Ōtautahi) and, Bartley and Company (Pōneke Wellington).

  Web site
• Judy Darragh
  

  Judy Darragh
  Auckland, NZ

  Judy Darragh is a prolific New Zealand artist renowned for her brightly coloured sculptural assemblages of found objects, recycled items, industrial materials, collage, photography, video, and poster art. Emerging as an artist during the 1980s era of conspicuous consumption, Darragh’s work displayed a fondness for everyday objects and played with our views of material consumerism. 

  ‘Kitsch’ and a strong association with localised nostalgia is at the essence of Darragh’s work. Her assemblages appear as structurally makeshift piles of ‘materials’, incorporating elements ranging from bottles, glassware and plastic to corks, feathers, tikis, beads, paint, flowers, paua and cake tins. It is this mass of media that form the basis of her two dimensional and three dimensional installations.

   

   

  Web site
• Katharina Grosse
  

  Katharina Grosse
  Berlin, Germany

  Katharina Grosse (b. 2 October 1961) is a German artist. Grosse's work employs a use of architecture, sculpture and painting. She is known for her large-scale, site-related installations to create immersive visual experiences.

  She has been using an industrial paint-sprayer to apply prismatic swaths of color to a variety of surfaces since the late 1990s, and often uses bright, unmixed sprayed-on acrylic paints to create both large-scale sculptural elements and smaller wall works.

  Web site
• Leigh Martin
  

  Leigh Martin
  Auckland, NZ

  Born in Hamilton New Zealand, Martin gained a Bachelor of Fine ArtsHons in Drawing and Painting, Glasgow School of Fine Arts, Glasgow, Scotland in 1993. In 2013 he gained a master’s degree in Art & Design (1st Class Honours) at Auckland Institute of Technology.

  He has been a Tutor and lecturer at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, NZ, the University of technology, Auckland, New Zealand and the School of Fine Art, Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand. His work is held in both private and public collections including, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery—Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand, James Wallace Collection, Auckland, New Zealand and the Fletcher Collection, Auckland, New Zealand.

  Web site
• Marcia Hafif
  

  Marcia Hafif
  United States

  Marcia Hafif (b. 1929 - 2018) was an American artist known for her painted explorations of materiality and the perception of color. Hafif’s monochromes probed the formal components of the medium while also tethering those concerns to an outside motif. “The subject can be anything from designing a museum to the writing of foreign calligraphy, from naming weeds to making ice in the desert using cold night winds,” she once explained. “For me they are all experiments for the purpose of seeing more closely.” 

  The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.

   

   

  Web site
• Noel Ivanoff
  

  Noel Ivanoff
  Auckland, NZ

  Noel Ivanoff (b. 1963 Lower Hutt, Aotearoa) completed a Diploma in Fine art at Dunedin School of Art 1984, a certificate in advanced studies (postgraduate) at St Martins School of Art in London (1986) and MFA (1st class honours) at Elam School of Fine Arts (1999). 

  Ivanoff focuses on the structures and supports on which paintings are made, locating his work in contemporary discourse concerning the three dimensionality of painting. Ivanoff has exhibited widely in New Zealand, The UK, Europe, Japan and Australia.  Works by Noel Ivanoff are held in the The Chartwell Trust Collection, the Fletcher Trust Collection and the James Wallace Arts trust Collection. Noel is a Senior Lecturer at Whitecliffe College where he taught since 1995.

   

   

  Web site
• Renee Cosgrove
  

  Renee Cosgrove
  Melbourne, Australia

  Renee Cosgrave is a Narrm (Melbourne) based artist from Aotearoa of Irish, Scottish and Māori descent of the Ngāti Tūwharetoa iwi. Her practice investigates abstract painting, repetition, colour, place, culture and wairua. Renee was the recipient of the 2019 MECCA M-Power National Gallery of Victoria Arts Mentoring Grant.

  Web site
• Simon Morris
  

  Simon Morris
  Wellington, NZ

  Simon Morris is based in Wellington, where he lectures in painting at Whiti O Rehua School of Art, Massey University.

  Over the course of his career Morris has skilfully developed an ongoing investigation into the perception of space, time and action which he explores through their representation in visual systems. Concerned with the possibilities that surface from self-imposed restraints on structure, materials and process, his diverse painting practice extends to site responsive wall painting and architectural collaborations that includes two major collaborations with Athfield Architects completing Rainscreen for The Dowse Art Museum, followed by Light in Space, and Space in Light commissioned by Otago University (2007).

  Web site
• Winston Roeth
  

  Winston Roeth
  United States

  Winston Roeth paints monochrome or two-toned panels on supports that range from slate, dibond, and honeycomb, to MDF and raw cedar, often combining them to form grids or rows of panels in various different colors.

  Working in raw pigment and tempera medium, Roeth layers his paint into dense matte surfaces, sometimes painting the contour of a work in a contrasting color. He begins by sketching and organizing his ideas in “Desktop Drawings,” graphite and ink drawings on graph paper. “I use the drawing primarily as a compositional tool, especially when I’m organizing a grid, which presents so many variables within such a simple form,” he has said. “I can measure out a painting in front of my eyes using a desktop drawing.”

  Web site

André Hemer
Vienna, Austria

André Hemer is a New Zealand born, Vienna based painter. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury and PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Sydney. He coined the term 'new representation' to capture what his painting is doing with its integration of the digital with dynamic and sensuous and layering of spray paint, oil and acrylic with thick impasto.

 

Hemer is represented by galleries in London, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, Sydney, Auckland and Wellington. 

 

View artwork

Callum Innes
Edinburgh, Scotland

Callum Innes (b. 1962) studied at Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen and Edinburgh College of Art. Innes was short-listed for the Turner and Jerwood Prizes in 1995, won the prestigious NatWest Prize for Painting in 1998, and in 2002 was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting. He has exhibited internationally and his work is held in public collections worldwide including the Guggenheim, New York; National Gallery of Australia; TATE, London, and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. From Memory, a major exhibition of Callum Innes' work over the past 15 years, was shown at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2006 and toured Modern Art Oxford, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

View artwork

Christine Reifenberger
Cologne, Germany

Born in 1964 in Waldsassen, she lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Christine Reifenberger’s painting causes forms, contours and figurative lines to evolve. In her work, real phenomena metamorphose into poetic organisms. Her subjects become flows of consciousness that border on the supernatural and come close to the grotesque. In addition to her two-dimensional work on canvas and paper, the artist also uses this latter support to contort colour surfaces in space, transforming their state and that of their medium.

View artwork

Christoph Dahlhausen
Bonn, Germany

Dahlhausen, born 1960, is a fine artist and curator based in Bonn (GER) and Melbourne (AUS). From 2013 to 2019, he was an Adjunct Professor of Fine Art at the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne. Dahlhausen runs Raum2810, a space for international contemporary art in Bonn. He has realised installations and exhibitions in Europe, America, South America, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. 

The current exhibition WestFarbe started as a travelling exhibition in 2016 across three museum and art space venues in Germany, such as Raum2810 in Bonn, Museum Gelsenkirchen and Stadtmuseum Siegburg.

WestFarbe is curated by Christoph Dahlhausen.

View artwork

David Thomas
Melbourne, Australia

David Thomas (born in Belfast N. Ireland) lives and works in Melbourne, Australia, he studied at Melbourne, Monash and RMIT Universities and holds a PhD from RMIT. His work explores the contemplative function of painting, photopainting and installation, in particular how new iterations of the monochrome tradition can address  the perception of time and space, complexity, impermanence, knowing and feeling. 

His work is held in numerous private and public collections including: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; and the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand.

He exhibits widely in Australia, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

 

View artwork

Frank Piasta
Freiberg, Germany

Frank Piasta began his studies under Gotthard Graubner at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, continuing, after 1996, at the Academy of Arts in Berlin under Kuno Gonschior. Encouraged by these two teachers, he followed their example of abandoning traditional panel painting. By employing unusual mediums and tools not yet grown stale by use, he was able to find his own independent artistic direction and to wrest new possibilities of expression from the métier. Contrasting with Graubner's voluminous expanses of color and Gonschior's thick application of paint, frequently without the use of the traditional brush, Frank Piasta creates works whose layered silicon lends them both a corporeal materiality and a nuanced coloring.

View artwork

Helen Calder
Christchurch, NZ

Helen Calder is a painter based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, she holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury. Calder’s practice is a continual exploration of the properties and limits of paint as a material. She pushes the medium beyond its traditional form supported by canvas and panel, to create three-dimensional works that hang, puddle and fold both on and off the wall. 

Calder has works held in New Zealand private and public collections including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Christchurch Art Gallery. She is represented by Nadene Milne Gallery (Arrowtown and Ōtautahi) and, Bartley and Company (Pōneke Wellington).

View artwork

Judy Darragh
Auckland, NZ

Judy Darragh is a prolific New Zealand artist renowned for her brightly coloured sculptural assemblages of found objects, recycled items, industrial materials, collage, photography, video, and poster art. Emerging as an artist during the 1980s era of conspicuous consumption, Darragh’s work displayed a fondness for everyday objects and played with our views of material consumerism. 

‘Kitsch’ and a strong association with localised nostalgia is at the essence of Darragh’s work. Her assemblages appear as structurally makeshift piles of ‘materials’, incorporating elements ranging from bottles, glassware and plastic to corks, feathers, tikis, beads, paint, flowers, paua and cake tins. It is this mass of media that form the basis of her two dimensional and three dimensional installations.

 

 

View artwork

Katharina Grosse
Berlin, Germany

Katharina Grosse (b. 2 October 1961) is a German artist. Grosse's work employs a use of architecture, sculpture and painting. She is known for her large-scale, site-related installations to create immersive visual experiences.

She has been using an industrial paint-sprayer to apply prismatic swaths of color to a variety of surfaces since the late 1990s, and often uses bright, unmixed sprayed-on acrylic paints to create both large-scale sculptural elements and smaller wall works.

View artwork

Leigh Martin
Auckland, NZ

Born in Hamilton New Zealand, Martin gained a Bachelor of Fine ArtsHons in Drawing and Painting, Glasgow School of Fine Arts, Glasgow, Scotland in 1993. In 2013 he gained a master’s degree in Art & Design (1st Class Honours) at Auckland Institute of Technology.

He has been a Tutor and lecturer at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, NZ, the University of technology, Auckland, New Zealand and the School of Fine Art, Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand. His work is held in both private and public collections including, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery—Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand, James Wallace Collection, Auckland, New Zealand and the Fletcher Collection, Auckland, New Zealand.

View artwork

Marcia Hafif
United States

Marcia Hafif (b. 1929 - 2018) was an American artist known for her painted explorations of materiality and the perception of color. Hafif’s monochromes probed the formal components of the medium while also tethering those concerns to an outside motif. “The subject can be anything from designing a museum to the writing of foreign calligraphy, from naming weeds to making ice in the desert using cold night winds,” she once explained. “For me they are all experiments for the purpose of seeing more closely.” 

The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.

 

 

View artwork

Noel Ivanoff
Auckland, NZ

Noel Ivanoff (b. 1963 Lower Hutt, Aotearoa) completed a Diploma in Fine art at Dunedin School of Art 1984, a certificate in advanced studies (postgraduate) at St Martins School of Art in London (1986) and MFA (1st class honours) at Elam School of Fine Arts (1999). 

Ivanoff focuses on the structures and supports on which paintings are made, locating his work in contemporary discourse concerning the three dimensionality of painting. Ivanoff has exhibited widely in New Zealand, The UK, Europe, Japan and Australia.  Works by Noel Ivanoff are held in the The Chartwell Trust Collection, the Fletcher Trust Collection and the James Wallace Arts trust Collection. Noel is a Senior Lecturer at Whitecliffe College where he taught since 1995.

 

 

View artwork

Renee Cosgrove
Melbourne, Australia

Renee Cosgrave is a Narrm (Melbourne) based artist from Aotearoa of Irish, Scottish and Māori descent of the Ngāti Tūwharetoa iwi. Her practice investigates abstract painting, repetition, colour, place, culture and wairua. Renee was the recipient of the 2019 MECCA M-Power National Gallery of Victoria Arts Mentoring Grant.

View artwork

Simon Morris
Wellington, NZ

Simon Morris is based in Wellington, where he lectures in painting at Whiti O Rehua School of Art, Massey University.

Over the course of his career Morris has skilfully developed an ongoing investigation into the perception of space, time and action which he explores through their representation in visual systems. Concerned with the possibilities that surface from self-imposed restraints on structure, materials and process, his diverse painting practice extends to site responsive wall painting and architectural collaborations that includes two major collaborations with Athfield Architects completing Rainscreen for The Dowse Art Museum, followed by Light in Space, and Space in Light commissioned by Otago University (2007).

View artwork

Winston Roeth
United States

Winston Roeth paints monochrome or two-toned panels on supports that range from slate, dibond, and honeycomb, to MDF and raw cedar, often combining them to form grids or rows of panels in various different colors.

Working in raw pigment and tempera medium, Roeth layers his paint into dense matte surfaces, sometimes painting the contour of a work in a contrasting color. He begins by sketching and organizing his ideas in “Desktop Drawings,” graphite and ink drawings on graph paper. “I use the drawing primarily as a compositional tool, especially when I’m organizing a grid, which presents so many variables within such a simple form,” he has said. “I can measure out a painting in front of my eyes using a desktop drawing.”

View artwork