Foenander Galleries is proud to present two independent exhibitions by Michael Dell & Monique Lacey – two artists known for their abstract logic and attention to material.

Michael Dell  |  Backlit Fields

Michael Dell’s paintings shift 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.

Backlit Fields is a continuation of that studio practice.

This exhibition, consisting of predominately landscape work is based from an ongoing observation of certain locations from the rural outskirts of Whakatū Nelson, where he lives. These paintings are based on roadside views from the Moutere Highway and the Takaka Valley. Through photographing these locations and using the images as a reference point, he physically appropriates the camera’s gaze, reducing the images to a visual perception of a view, or scene, by painting them. Any formal relationship between the photograph and the painting becomes more disproportional through Dell’s studio process, in his thinking and choice of materials.

While these landscape paintings can seem to be grounded in that particular genre of art history, there is a present time ambivalence and everyday commonplace approach towards the chosen subjects that suggests a stronger interest in abstraction, rather than objective representation. The landscapes in Dell’s paintings are reduced to a single motif – where the subject sits within the processes and constructs of picture making.

Michael Dell graduated from Canterbury University School Of Fine Art in 1994. Since that time he has exhibited throughout New Zealand, internationally in Japan, and more recently in a solo show Distant Pictures in Berlin, Germany in 2024. Dell is a recipient of numerous awards, including two of New Zealand’s premier national drawing awards; the Cranleigh Barton Drawing Award in 1993, while in his final year at art school, and more recently the Parkin Drawing Prize in 2019. His work is held in various Public collections, including the Christchurch City Art Gallery / Te Puna o Waiwhetū,  The University of Auckland / Waipapa Taumata Rau, The Suter Gallery / Te Aratoi o Whakatū and the Waikato Museum of Art and History / Te Whare Taonga o Waikato.

Monique Lacey  | Truth Untold

Monique Lacey practice finds an initial footing in Minimalism. While her work embraces the manufactured, utilitarian materials of the world as found objects, there is an emphatic emphasis on interventions as a maker. Her practice utilises apparently destructive gestures in order to create the work, and may offer a playful critique of Minimalism and it’s tensions between surface and form, image and object – collapsing the distinction between sculpture and painting.

Lacey’s works begin with new commercial packaging materials purchased at local hardware stores which offer structural givens of both volume and surface. These flat-packed materials are assembled and then covered with plaster, paint, resin, rubber, wax, varnish and pigments which act as both binding agents and new surfaces to conceal or reveal the structure underneath.

While Lacey adherer’s to truth to materials, these materials are also used to construct a level of artifice in the work. The transformation and elevation of the ordinariness of the humble cardboard box fascinates me. The initial building up of each form is countered by acts of crushing the cardboard boxes, which results in their forms being both damaged and substantially reconfigured. This act of crushing utilises my bodyweight, and might be variously read as playful, aggressive, cathartic or darkly humorous. Truth Untold seeks to complicate the values associated with certain materials and the codes of art – a cardboard box as inexpensive and pedestrian, its coating of paint an embellishment of decorated skin – and leave these productive tensions unresolved.

Monique Lacey graduated from Whitecliffe with a Master of Fine Arts (First Class) in 2018 and has exhibited widely across Aotearoa since 2011. In 2023 Lacey exhibited at Miami Art Week, with Alfa Gallery, and has recently exhibited in Huston, Texus with Gray Contemporary and was part of the curated show Disbend-Suspend Italy. She has been a regular finalist in a number of art awards, including Glaister Ennor Graduate Art Awards, Wallace Art Awards, Molly Morpeth Canday and the Walker and Hall, Art Awards and has work in public, private and corporate collections in Australasia, Europe, USA & Asia