Every Time The Sun Comes Up
27 August–15 September
Michael Dell’s paintings are unremarkable in the conventional sense – landscape views from the roadside, locations of familiar terrain, reductive abstractions and smooth painted surfaces. Yet through sustained observation these landscape paintings and small abstractions become charged with a quiet attentiveness. Like the exhibition’s title, which evokes both repetition and renewal, the paintings reflect on the cyclical nature of time and the subtle transformations within acts of looking. In this way, Dell’s work attends to the ordinary and the singular, revealing how familiarity itself can become a site for the slow burn of sustained contemplation.
Michael Dell graduated from Canterbury University School Of Fine Art in 1994. Since that time he has exhibited throughout New Zealand, internationally in Japan, and more recently in a solo show Distant Pictures in Berlin, Germany in 2024. Dell is a recipient of numerous awards, including two of New Zealand’s premier national drawing awards; the Cranleigh Barton Drawing Award in 1993, while in his final year at art school, and more recently the 2019 Parkin Drawing Prize.
Featured artwork: Roadside Landscape at Moutere
