Der Tiefenglanz / Felsengarten by Karl Fritsch & Gavin Hipkins

Artist list

Karl Fritsch, Gavin Hipkins

About the Artists:

Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist who works with photography and moving image. He has been described as a ‘tourist of photography’ reflecting a strategic treatment of eclectic styles and diverse photographic techniques. Over the last two decades his practice has engaged postcolonial, architectural, and commodity discourses via a range of analogue and digital technologies, photo-installations, and artist videos. In 2010 he started making fragmented narrative films that frequently call on nineteenth-century references, and adapts these writings to contemporary settings. His projects engage film as a cinematic art that blurs definable genres between drama, documentary, film essay, and experimental narrative structures. In 2014, Hipkins’ first feature film Erewhon — an essay adaptation of Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, Or Over the Range — premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival and Edinburgh Art Festival.

He has exhibited widely including: International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2015); The Jewish Museum, New York, USA (2015); Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York, USA (2014); City Art Centre, Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland (2014); Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany (2013); Armory Film, The Armory Show, New York (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2011); Austrian Museum of Applied Art and Contemporary Art (MAK), Vienna, Austria (2011); Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2010); San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California, USA (2007); International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, USA, (2006); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA (2000); Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Guarene d’ Alba, Italy, (2000).

He represented New Zealand at the 1998 Sydney Biennale, and the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale. He was the recipient of the inaugural residency for New Zealand artists at Artspace Sydney, in 1998. In 2006 he completed an artist’s residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, and in 2007 completed the McCahon Residency in Auckland. His work is included in major public and private collections including the Queensland Art Gallery, the Auckland Art Gallery, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, and George Eastman Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York. He is an Associate Professor at Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland.


Karl Fritsch has gained international recognition for his ever developing body of work, which has focussed almost solely on rings. Fritsch’s jewellery is unmistakable. His works vary from hand-moulded one-off castings, to re-cast, contrastingly daintier jewel-embedded rings, to towering stacks of cut and colourful glass. His ability to continually create new rings is vast and varied. Combining traditional techniques, playing on jewellery history, he has developed has own personal language. He is capable of applying both careful and quick consideration to the materials and objects he works with, and employs precious and base metals, facetted and found stones in his work with egalitarian abandon, turning the most ordinary into the extraordinary.
“Of course the ring wants to be beautiful. The technique also wants to be beautiful, and most often it’s the idea that wants to be the most beautiful. But sometimes a ring likes nothing better than to sit in the mud and not give a damn about how it looks. If it’s exactly what it wants to be in a given moment, it is precise, perfect and the most beautiful”. Karl Fritsch
 
Born in Germany in 1962, Karl Fritsch was classically trained at the Goldsmith’s College in Pforzheim, and then attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He has exhibited extensively, presented guest lectures around the world and his work is held in private and public collections internationally, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Pinakothek of Modern Art in Munich, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
He has been the recipient of a number of awards including the Herbert Hoffman Prize from the International Craftsmen Trade Fair in Munich and the prestigious jury-selected Francoise van den Bosch Award (2006), given every 2 years to an international jewellery and object maker who is recognised for his/ her oeuvre, influence and contribution to the field.
Fritsch moved to New Zealand with his family in 2010, and now lives and works in Wellington.