Glen Wolfgramm
Glen Wolfgramm was born in Auckland in 1971. Of Tongan and Irish descent, he is self-taught, his paintings conveying echoes of both the Pacific, and some space-age, futuristic world existing now only in our imaginations, nurtured by the world of sci fi movies. Wolfgramm has been exhibiting since 1998, was a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards in 2000 and was selected to represent New Zealand at the 2000 Biennale d’Art Contemporain in Noumea, alongside Michael Parekowhai and Lisa Reihana.
‘Wolfgramm views every painting as “a chapter, a verse, a voice that is passing the experience of my forebears to me and through me and on, out into the wide world”; like emissaries, Wolfgramm’s paintings themselves migrate, voyaging out into the world and carrying their stories with them.’ (Orex Gallery website, 2011)
The paintings that are still available are marked as such in the title. For enquiries, please contact Rex at Orexart – link below.
GALLERY
Orex Gallery, Auckland
BIBLIOGRAPHY
TJ McNamara, Auckland’s Brand of art Flourishing, NZ Herald, B/5 26/07/07 with photograph, 2007
Art New Zealand Today, ed. Liz Caughey, Saint Publishing, Auckland, 2002
TJ McNamara, Critics Choice, NZHerald, B/12 30/10/00, 2000
Peter Simpson, Revue, Sunday Star Times, F4, 19/3/00, 2000
Aotearoa Pasifika: Three New Zealand Artists, Professor Peter Simpson, State of the Arts (Australia/New Zealand) Feb/March 2000
‘The Promoter: Something New Something Spiky’, Ken Cooke, Art New Zealand No. 93 Summer 1999/00
T.J. McNamara, Weekend Books & Art, NZHerald, H7 9-10/5/98
Auckland Aesthetics, Andrew Frost, Australian Art Collector, No.6, 1998
I saw the Orex stand with the large Wolfgramm paintings at the Auckland Artfair this weekend. While his work looks good in these images, when you actually see them in their full large scale they are impressive. He seems to achieve a deep 3D layering that actually moves out and off the canvas.
Artlover you are absolutely right. The work is developed with many layers each imposing another series of lines and movements that never obliterate what is below but seem to intensify and magnify the overall image as they build… the more you look the more you see…. like looking into intense weavings, foliage, structures, roadway systems and buildings, all mixed in with smaller details of carvings, tattoo marks, fish, nets and birds and even urban graffiti. Is this the ‘real’ look of Auckland’s (and new Zealand’s) younger Pacific artists or can we now dispense with the term ‘Pacific’ and say it’s New Zealand painting now, unafraid to be ‘regional’ and reflective of ‘here and now’. ‘Here’ being New Zealand, a place with a huge diversity of cultural influences that can all legitimately and confidently be pulled into our own representation of what we see as an art that is about and from ‘us’. With our clamoring for some sort of ‘international’ look to our work some have tended to dismiss the ‘regional’ as too restrictive, too small, to give us any standing within the world, but it is our very difference that sets us apart and gives us our distinctive voice. Glen’s work is distinctive, different, and regional, but like all good writing that is deeply personal and individual it speaks to the wider audience because it reminds them of what it is to be a single voice, human, touched by another’s singularity in this crowded world.