Tony Lane: Practical Metaphysics
Tony Lane: Practical Metaphysics
8 October 2006 – 28 January 2007
Principal Sponsor: 
Tony Lane is one of New Zealand’s most respected painters. This exhibition is a survey of work from 1989 to the present day of 30-35 works drawn from private and public collections around New Zealand. Eschewing a conventional chronological structure, this exhibition, with thematic clusters led by Lane’s particular symbolic-vocabulary, proposes a new take on this esteemed painter’s practice.
While his 1970s work was vibrant, gestural abstract painting, the early 1980s saw the introduction of figurative elements, with the works still retaining a heavy impasto surface and a robust physicality. In 1983 Lane became compelled by the work of El Greco and the early Italian painters, and began to encompass the frame into the picture, painting its surface, transforming the paintings into an object. The use of schlagmetal (a copper and bronze metal leaf) along with gold and silver leaf in his work has been recurrent, rendering surfaces luminous and richly metallic. In 1984 he took an influential trip to Europe, through which his interest in the Italian primitives and thirteenth century architecture deepened. He has continued to regularly visit Europe and his fascination has extended to encompass Dutch and Spanish painting.
While many of the motifs he uses can be recognised from traditions of Western European votive painting (particularly Catholic altarpieces and frescoes), his use of symbols such as the veil, the wound, a beaded necklace, a vessel, and his representations of elements such as air, water, fire and smoke elude a singular reading. The objects Lane depicts are both ‘everyday’ (a table with wine bottles, a chair, a piece of folded linen, a drop of fluid, a coil of rope) and also have a charged symbolic potency. Their enigmatic qualities encourage us to wonder and imagine – drawing our own narratives and associations.
Tony Lane was born in Kati Kati, New Zealand in 1949. He graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University in 1970 and has exhibited extensively in New Zealand (including a solo exhibition at City Gallery Wellington in 1989) and internationally and has work in most major collections in New Zealand. He was based in Wellington for twenty-five years and now lives and works in Auckland.
A City Gallery Wellington exhibition, curated by Heather Galbraith, with accompanying publication.