The bad boys of New Zealand art are celebrated in a confrontational new Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition.
"Boys from the Black Stuff" heralds an underground core of contemporary New Zealand artists who use dark humour and pathos to raise challenging questions about art.
Curator Aaron Kreisler mined the DPAG's permanent and long-term loan collections for the works.
"It's really about black humour. They are all dark-humoured guys who create art with a full stop and a question mark," he said yesterday.
"They're dealing with a subject matter that people are uncomfortable with. We were trying to get a number of works together by a group of artists. It's mixing up works from different generations in a way that they start to talk to each other."
The exhibition includes works by late art provocateur Don Driver who died, aged 81, in New Plymouth on December 8, Peter Peryer, Rohan Wealleans, Simon Denny, Ronnie van Hout, Giovanni Intra, Peter Black and Campbell Patterson.
"There is a fascination with the bad boy in certain areas of art. [Don] was totally thought of as a bad boy for a long period of his life. He had works removed for being a deviant," Kreisler said.
"We were actually hanging his Len Lye work when I got a phone call that he had passed away; which was nice."
Te Papa also installed Driver's 1984 assemblage, Yellow Skin 90, this week to mark the artist's passing and acknowledge his contribution to contemporary New Zealand art.
The exhibition ranges from a sculpture of a decapitated head with the speech bubble "I Guess I Lose", to a suspended swastiked spaceship, which beams projections on to the floor.
"It's a conflution of extreme elements. It's about disrupting the relationship with art to create art that challenges you," Kreisler said.
"It challenges notions of taste and what people relate to. Artists at the contemporary level have always challenged that phenomenon. It's no coincidence that all these artists are guys."
Artsits Rohan Wealleans and Campbell Patterson will visit and interfere with the exhibition early next year.
"We're hoping they'll bring more works and make some changes to the exhibition, so we can get their take on it."
Kreisler will hold a free floor talk about the exhibition from 3pm to 4pm on February 26.
The exhibition runs until March 24.
