Michael Dell

Michael Dell graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 1994. While in his final year at art school he won the 1993 Cranleigh Barton National Drawing Award. Recently Dell won the 2019 Parkin Drawing Prize, which makes him one of the few artists to win both of this country’s premier drawing awards.

Michael Dell's work shifts from subject to non-subject, from representation to abstraction, where both modes of visual discourse reveal an evident attention to materiality and the static tension between picture surface and picture depth.

His landscape and abstract paintings and drawings are rendered with the same meticulous treatment, where the formal distinction between representation and abstraction becomes irrelevant. Dell's works display an interest in the ordinary and the commonplace and also reveal an ambivalent and enigmatic approach towards his chosen subject or non subject, within the constructs of picture making.

He is widely recognised for the particular surface quality of his paintings and has work in a number of significant public collections, including:

Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Waikato Museum of Art, Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
The University of Auckland Collection Waipapa Taumata Rau
The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū
Te Pūkenga Whanganui
The Parkin Drawing Collection
The Kellihur Arts Trust
The Ballin Collection, Seoul
Tokyo Bank Collection, Japan
The National Bank Art Collection
The Art House Trust