WHANGEREI, NEW ZEALAND.- Whangarei Art Museum Te Wharetaonga o Whangarei is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition entitled Painting problems: the work of Julian Dashper 1990-2006. This exhibition surveys selected works by well known artist Julian Dashper that examine many of the ongoing critical issues inherent to painting today. Dashper has a long-standing interest in painting as an actual subject for making art as well as an international reputation for his work in this area. The exhibition will include works in a diverse range of mediums such as wool, wood, sound, paint on canvas, rabbit skin size on French linen and polycarbonate.

An illustrated publication (being released post opening) will accompany the exhibition, featuring a recent interview text between Auckland based writer Mark Kirby and Dashper, discussing Dashper’s highly particular and sometimes strangely unorthodox painting practice. Kirby has written extensively on Dashper’s work in the past, most recently in a text entitled `Dashper again and again’ for a survey exhibition of the same name he curated at the Aratoi Museum in Wairarapa earlier this year.

Julian Dashper and Mark Kirby will present a floor talk in the museum in Whangarei on Sunday 13th August at 2.00 pm. All are welcome to attend this presentation as well as the opening to the public at 3.00 pm afterwards.

Julian Dashper, who last showed in Whangarei in 1988 at the North Gallery, is well known to New Zealand audiences through his regular exhibitions in this country since 1980. Dashper has also shown widely in Australia, throughout Europe and in America since 1992. In 2001 he was based in America as an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas http://www.chinati.org/ funded by a senior Fulbright fellowship. His work from the last 25 years is currently the subject of a major touring retrospective in the U.S.A, the first such exhibition ever for a New Zealand based artist http://www.minusspace.com/. Dashper continues to live and work in Auckland where he was born in 1960.