AUCKLAND.-Laurence Aberhart has been a pioneer and forerunner in contemporary New Zealand photography since the 1970s, and is increasingly recognised as a major international figure. This Saturday Auckland Art Gallery opens Laurence Aberhart, a landmark exhibition in New Zealand photography from City Gallery Wellington.

City Gallery senior curator Gregory O’Brien worked closely with the artist and writer/curator of contemporary art, Justin Paton, to mount the major survey show, which brings together over 200 key works from the last four decades in fourteen thematic clusters. The exhibition testifies to Aberhart’s extensive and faithful meditation on culture and time. Aberhart’s photographs resonate with a poetics of place that makes them an essential part Laurence Aberhart Old bridge structure from new bridge, Clutha River, Alexandria December 1980 Courtesy of the artist of New Zealand’s history as well as offering insights into other parts of the world.

Aberhart’s quiet yet potent photographs of church interiors, meeting houses, landscapes, graveyards and lodges are recognizable for their absence of figures and their profundity of detail into depth. His work is a kind of archaeology: a study of what humans leave behind. Its particular visual and emotional tone owes much to the artist’s technique. Aberhart’s continued use of a 19th century plate camera (which requires up to 12 hour exposures) and the way he trains its lens on the stuff that remains in the wake of time, express his interest in the evolution of his subjects. As such, writes O’Brien, ‘the images are bathed in the light of photographic history, as well as that of the world around’. Indeed, many of Aberhart’s images appear illuminated from within, as if the artist were capturing a metamorphosis of the monumental objects that characterise his work.

Laurence Aberhart is part of Auckland Art Gallery’s autumn season and is accompanied by ABERHART, a definitive book from Victoria University Press, with 235 beautifully produced full-page reproductions.

Biography: Laurence Aberhart was born in Nelson in 1949. While working as a teacher in Northland in the 1960s, Aberhart taught himself photography and began exhibiting in the late 1970s. In 1988 he travelled to America as a Fullbright Fellow and in 1993 to France as the Moet and Chandon Fellow. In 1999 he was artist in residence, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and in 2000 he represented New Zealand in Flight Patterns, MCA, Los Angeles. Recent major exhibitions include All Gates Open, Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 1998; Ghostwriting: Photographs of Macau, Macau Museum of Art, Macau, 2001; Laurence Aberhart: Photographs (alongside Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2002; Laurence Aberhart, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2005. Aberhart’s work is held in private and public collections around the world. Since 1983, the artist has lived and worked in Russell, Bay of Islands. He travels extensively and has three children.