New Len Lye Centre and a new era for the Govett Brewster Gallery

The art business seems to be booming at the moment, with five major public galleries undergoing major refurbishments and building programmes.

The new gallery in Ashburton has recently opened and the new Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (Te Uru) adjacent to Lopdell House will be opened next month.

The Sargeant Gallery expansion in Whanganui is under way but probably not opening until 2019 and the Suter Art Gallery in Nelson is starting on a redevelopment programme as well.

The most eagerly awaited development will be the Len Lye Centre, the new extension to the Govett Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth opening next year.

The building is the most innovative design of any  public galleries which new director Simon Rees is proud of: “We had a scrupulous competition, with Sir Miles Warren as the lead judge, with the competition won by Andrew Paterson Associates of Auckland.

"The building was imagined as a megaron [great hall of the Grecian palace] for Len Lye, a temple inspired by a drawing made by him of a temple made of waterspouts. It has a facade of highly polished reflective stainless steel. It’s really the first piece of destination architecture linked to contemporary art and it will be a major presence in the city.

The budget for the building is $11.5 million, with the major funders The Ministry of Culture and Heritage, the NZ Lottery Grants Board and Todd Energy. The overall space created for the gallery will be 2600sq m,  which will make it a bit bigger than the City Gallery in Wellington and will also have a 60-seat cinema intended to be a home for Len Lye’s films but which also gives the gallery the capacity to have film events and provide opportunities for moving image artists.

The new gallery will feature a newly commissioned work by Paul Hartigan. Another work by him adorned the exterior of the old building but had to be decommissioned with the rebuilding programme.

Rees is pleased that all of the contractors and subcontractors are from the Taranaki region and that local companies have been able to cope with the experimental engineering required. “New Plymouth is one of the engineering centres of the country – everything for the new building has been purchased in the region. The only exception is that the stainless steel exterior sheeting was finally polished overseas.”

In decommissioning the 1997 building and because of changes to the building code the existing building has been strengthened and that cost has run into the multi million dollars because the refurbished cinema was from the 1930’s. Another new part of the project is the large off-suite storage area which has been built to house the collection in a state-of-the-art facility, with the former storage space able to be used for conservation projects and more capacity during exhibition installation and de-installation.

Rees notes that Len Lye and his work are central to the gallery. “The building opened in 1970 and his collection has been at Govett Brewster since 1980, so for 35 years of the gallery history his work has been part of it.” “The 1977 survey exhibition of his work was the first international exhibition of his work and he fell in love with the institution at that point.

“The Len Lye Foundation is embodied in the life of the gallery so we have a very robust conservation process.

The foundation remains the owner of the works, which are on loan to the gallery, and retains the copyright – and it has the engineering experts and the driving force with people like Roger Horrocks, one of the country’s leading film scholars and biographer of Len Lye (he also write the opera on Len Lye).”

“At present Wind Wand is the only Len Lye work installed in the city but there are other sculptures that can be erected outside but in the new building there will be what is called The Large Works Gallery with a nine metre stud – so some of these very large objects will be able to be installed in a gallery for the first time.

So, Giant Fountain, the larger Blades works which Len had imagined large but only ever built smaller versions using the technology of the time.” Rees has major plans for the development of an exhibitions programme expanding on the institutions focus on putting New Zealand art first withy an emphasis on the Pacific Rim.

“In the very first interview with the first director John Maynard he mentions Mexico but there has never seen an exhibition of Mexican art not of Peru Columbia, Ecuador or Chile. So in three to four years from now we have a major project focused on art of the Southern Pacific Rim that will include looking at partnering with Vancouver.”

"In 2018 we will be the commemorating the end of the Great War in a different way, looking at the impact of the end of the war in Europe.

That war resulted in the establishment of new republics; Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Czechoslovakia as well as the smaller Austrian Republic.

So we will dedicate an exhibition to the contemporary art of those places marking the commemorations by looking at the changing nature of New Zealand in relation to Europe and the émigrés who went on to be part of our architectural and design tradition."

Rees is well positioned to oversee the new programmes as he was the curator of contemporary art at the gallery from 2002 to 2004.  

In 2003 he was invited to Stockholm to be the second curator in residence in the International Artists Studio Programme, which allowed him the opportunity to travel to the Nordic, Scandinavian and Baltic countries.

He was then offered the position of curator for the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, Lithuania as well as being appointed editor of CAC/Interviu Magazine before taking on the role of head of the exhibitions department.

He was commissioner of the award-winning Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and has also worked with Iceland, Estonia and in developing their pavilions at the Venice Biennale. More recently he was the head of programming and development at MAK, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Arts, which brings together applied arts, design, architecture, and contemporary art in one of the largest such galleries in Europe.

The first exhibition which will open at the new gallery will be Our Hearts of Darkness, which takes its title for Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. “I like Conrad’s metaphor of the waters from the River Thames running into the various waterways of the world bringing violence with it. So the violence expressed in much contemporary art and the deep-seated violence in our own culture is something the exhibition will explore."

There will be McCahon’s Parihaka Triptych, which the gallery is lucky to have as well as the Urewera Panel and his Victory over Death.

There will be some of Michael Parekowhai's photographic works from the Consolation of Philosophy Series where he has floral arrangement titles which are memorial to some of the great World War I battles as well as Ann Shelton’s photos of the Seacliffe woman’s wards (where Janet frame was incarcerated) and Fiona Clarke’s Go Girl series charting the transgender community in New Zealand.