LONDON.- Marlborough Contemporary announced an exhibition of works on paper by the self-taught New Zealand artist Susan Te Kahurangi King. Marking her first solo gallery show in Europe, the exhibition brings into to focus 32 drawings from throughout the artist’s career, offering an overview of King’s surreal and psychedelic landscapes, populated by her idiosyncratic characters.
Born in 1951 in Te Aroha, New Zealand, King was raised with eleven siblings on the North Island. Sometime between the ages of four and nine years, King gradually stopped speaking, over a period when she would still occasionally hum or sing while she drew. King then ceased drawing for a 20 year period, until with the encouragement of her mother and siblings she resumed again in 2008. The artist's extended family - beginning at an early age with her maternal grandmother - have dedicated themselves to caring for her and preserving not only her work, but also anecdotes and artifacts. Her father, who taught the Maori language, gave her the middle name "Te Kahurangi" meaning "the treasured one". Today she continues to draw every day, only breaking to silently socialise with her family during meals and excursions.
Included in the exhibition are several of King's early drawings which share the artist’s childish interests and qualities, yet belie an exceptional precocity. The artist renders endless permutations from summoned subjects such as “Blinky Doll”, “Fantaman”, “Bugs Bunny”, various Disney characters, “Noddy” and Queen Elizabeth II. Also included are characters referred to as "Green Things", her siblings' name for a particular cereal toy, which she reiterates from multiple perspectives.
King's isolation from verbal and written communication has allowed her to methodically create an entire analogous world through her work. The exhibition’s chronological viewpoint demonstrates how King’s seemingly "non-objective" concentric shapes have evolved from the truncated remnants of appropriated cartoon characters. Visual lists, or catalogs/indexes of certain objects, get reconfigured and distorted beyond recognition in subsequent pictures. Every viewing becomes a reevaluation, opening up new vistas, each with their own vocabularies and internal logic.
Since 2012, King's drawings have been shown at the Outsider Art Fair in New York and Paris, Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York as well as Robert Heald Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand. The Drawings of Susan Te Kahurangi King was published by the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami in conjunction with the artist's first one-person museum exhibition in 2016. This past year, the American Folk Art Museum established the Susan Te Kahurangi King Fellowship to conduct research on King’s work, alongside other self-taught contemporary artists.
On Saturday 3 June, between 3-6 pm, the gallery will host 'Drawing with Susan', an interactive group drawing session with the artists to celebrate the opening of King's exhibition. This event was most recently enacted on the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. King and the gallery will invite local London based artists and members of the public to participate in a silent drawing group in the gallery.
