Megan Hansen-Knarhoi is a contemporary New Zealand artist working predominantly in sculpture and site specific installation, investigating iconography, signs and symbols. Her work celebrates, scrutinises and satirises aspects of Christianity, creating friction between the sacred and profane, the positive and the negative, the beautiful and the ugly, and the physical and the cerebral. Her concepts are intertwined in the materials and rituals of the artworks she creates. Through the repetitive and obsessive-compulsive aspect of her work, certain rituals and beliefs are exposed as empty, arbitrary and absurd. The discipline of making is confused with obsession, making the ritual in a sense obsolete and meaningless but ironically, by its very devotion and proliferation, profound. New Zealand Art writer and critic Dr Edward Hanfling has described Hansen-Knarhoi as ‘one of New Zealand's finest artists’1, and by Curator Anna-Marie White as a distinctive figure in contemporary New Zealand art.2
1 ‘Threading a Fine Twine - A Critical Response to the Art of Megan Hansen-Knarhoi’, Art New Zealand, Number 120 / Spring 2006, pp.74-76, 89
2 http://thesuter.org.nz/whatson/meganhansen-knarhoijesusspells.aspx
Jesus Suits (detail)
Paul Nache Gallery
Upstairs, 89 Grey Street, Gisborne
3 February - 3 March 2012
Photograph: Megan Hansen-Knarhoi
Future Exhibitions
Jesus Suits
Paul Nache Gallery
Upstairs, 89 Grey Street, Gisborne
3 February - 3 March 2012
group exhibition
Melanie Roger Gallery
226 Jervois Road, Herne Bay, Auckland
22 February – 17 March 2012
Jesus Spells
in God Factor
The Monastery of St. Martin Tibăes, Braga, Portugal
April - May 2012
http://www.mosteirodetibaes.org/
installation by Cabrita Reis in exhibition space at The Monastery of St. Martin Tibăes, Braga, Portugal
For sales enquiries contact:
Melanie Roger Gallery Auckland
Paul Nache Gallery Gisborne