Further Information
Peter Robinson: Divine Comedy
Having gained considerable recognition within New Zealand, in 1995 Peter Robinson left for Europe on a residency in Germany and Belgium. Well known in the 1990s for work that addressed issues of Māori and Pākehā post-colonial identity and in particular his own Māori genealogy, he found that his distinctly New Zealand work was continually misunderstood by European audiences. Exploring the ‘big questions’—theories of existence and nothingness—Divine comedy comes out of the effort to have his work accepted at a truly international level.
The exhibition’s title references Dante’s book Divine Comedy in which the author explains his theories of heaven, hell and earth. Robinson draws on these theories, and on the work of European philosophers and scientists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, as the basis for his sculptures and prints. Robinson quotes these theorists on large digital prints using the international language of digital code—one reads, ‘There is no God, only being and nothingness’; another reads ‘Nothing can spring into existence from the void; nothing can vanish into the void from existence’. Sartre’s worm reads ‘Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm’, with the coded quote repeated in red and white in the shape of a double coil. Ironically, these digital prints reduce complex existential theories into minimal signs of zeroes and ones.
The glossy appearance and slick minimalism of the works in Divine comedy mark a break with the makeshift aesthetic of Robinson’s previous work where he used materials such as tar. Although the work does not explicitly address Māori issues, Robinson still uses traditional colours of red, black and white. The coil of Sartre’s worm looks like a stylisation of the koru, a symbol for growth and expansion, and the prints resemble the woven tukutuku panels found in meetinghouses. Furthermore, the 1s and 0s of binary code can also be read as ‘IO’, the Māori supreme being from which all creation derives. In this respect, Robinson’s work conflates the local or indigenous with the universal.
Divine comedy is an outcome of Peter Robinson’s residency in 2001 at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery as a participant in the Taranaki Artist in Residence Programme, a partnership between the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki, Te Kura Matatini o Taranaki. Robinson’s work from this residency formed the basis of his installation in Bi-Polar, the New Zealand exhibition
curated by Greg Burke at the 49th Venice Biennale 2001. Jacqueline Fraser was the other artist included in Bi-Polar and details from her site-specific installation A demure portrait of the artist strip searched
<< with 11 details of bi-polar disorder >> are exhibited in the adjacent gallery.
Peter Robinson was born in 1966 in Ashburton and is of Kai Tahu descent. He graduated from University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1989. Since that time he has rapidly gained prominence, exhibiting extensively in New Zealand as well as overseas. Robinson has represented New Zealand in several international art exhibitions including the 1998 Sydney Biennale and the 2000 Lyon Biennale, as well as the Venice Biennale 2001.