Installation shots from Toi Te Papa exhibition: Henry Lamb’s painting Death of a peasant, 1911. At left, framing by Te Papa about 1970; at right, frame put on by the artist in 1911, and now returned to the painting. © Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

Staging the show I rest my eye for a moment on the frame, taking a break from the work of looking hard at the painting I have come to see. Then, returning to the work at hand, I become conscious, if only just, of an adjustment to my perception; thatRead more

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As you know from my previous post, Tales from Te Papa went live on TVNZ6 on 1 September.  Over the coming weeks, we’ll post the mini-documentaries to the blog with more information – the stuff our staff weren’t able to fit into the Tales from Te Papa format and usefulRead more

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This is my opening post in a series to discuss approaches to the framing of paintings. This first one is a response to William McAloon’s post: Freedom to act and takes his blog post as a point of departure. I look at some of the issues involving the sympathetic framingRead more

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  The other night we hung the two McCahons we bought last year – Scared and Mondrian’s last chrysanthemum. They’ve gone up in Toi Te Papa. In the mid-1970s Colin McCahon did a lot of paintings on a thick high quality paper called Steinbach. Legend has it that McCahon’s dealerRead more

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John Reynolds’ work Cloud has come back from its stint at the Auckland Art Gallery for the 2008 Walters Prize exhibition late last year and it is now up and on show in the Contemporary Focus section of Toi Te Papa, Level 5. John came down from Auckland to installRead more

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