Max Gimblett: Where Light Lies

For Max Gimblett the studio has always been where the light lies. Featuring an arresting suite of recent paintings, this exhibition is testimony to the artist’s ceaseless pursuit towards enlightenment and a longstanding desire to articulate truth and humanity through his practice.

While ‘light’ is often emblematic of hope, where light lies, so too does its counterpart of darkness, those twin tenets governing humanity, religion, and spirituality. Now eighty-eight years old, Gimblett has continuously endeavoured to hold both in conscious synergy. Where Light Lies might also, in a playful equivocation, refer to those illusory qualities of light and the application of paint to canvas, and the potential for each to either illuminate or conceal.

Max Gimblett (b.1935, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau) has been primarily based in New York since 1972. His practice encompasses a complex synthesis of influences as varied as Abstract Expressionism, Modernism, Eastern and Western spirituality, Jungian psychology, and ancient cultures. Gimblett explores the multiplicity of meaning attached to revered objects and symbols, particularly the quatrefoil, which dates to pre-Christian times and is found in both Western and Eastern religions through forms such as the rose window, mandala, cross, and lotus. Gimblett steps further into the realm of the sacred with his use of precious metals; with gold and silver consistently associated with honour, wisdom, and enlightenment.

The Getty Research Institute Collection recently acquired an anthology of over 250 of Gimblett’s artist books — containing writings, drawings, collages, notes, quotes, and calculations — gifted by the artist and his wife, scholar, and curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. His work has been exhibited extensively and is held in significant public and private collections internationally and in Aotearoa. Major solo exhibitions include Ocean Wheel, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Christchurch (2020); The Art of Remembrance, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara (2016); The Word of God: The Sound of One Hand, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh USA (2011); and The Brush of All Things, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau (2004).