New Painting is a new exhibition at Gow Langsford Onehunga by Shane Cotton (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine and Te Uri Taniwha) opening tomorrow.

Cotton is an internationally renowned artist whose career has spanned over three decades. His practice is underpinned by recurrent questioning of his own bicultural identity, and our collective cultural identity in Aotearoa. 

In these new works, Cotton explores the collision of Indigenous and European time systems, placing ancestral figures in surreal, cosmic landscapes, exploring hybridities, transformation, and the nature of history.

Accompanying the exhibition is an essay by writer Anthony Byrt, Super Radiance, which explores this new body of work further. You can read Byrt’s essay here.

I had a kōrero with Shane about the exhibition and the ideas behind these works.