Orange Regional Gallery, Orange, NSW
23 March – 2 June, 2024
Euan Macleod: Flux
In Flux Euan Macleod presents a series of en plain air paintings made on Haupapa Tasman Glacier in New Zealand’s South Island, alongside a suite of studio works whose grand scale emulates their site of inspiration.
Macleod’s fascination with potentially dangerous environments recurs as he paints this sublime and inhospitable world of minerals, rock and ice. His climbers, often alone or linked by a rope to a companion figure or guide are metaphors through which the connection to and reliance on another human being is amplified.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
The Zoo Part 1
King Street Gallery
6 February - 2 March, 2024
Euan’s zoo works in this current exhibition examine in depth the animals in their enclosures. His marvellous zebras within cages, themselves stripes, resonate feelings of entrapment in today’s world. His way of working is immediate and he has an ability to empathise with the animals’ condition. His monkey studies convey a sense of freedom within their enclosure.
His spontaneous eruption of smudges and dirty colours more often than not produce a painting of extreme sensitivity and beauty – one can almost hear the animals breathe.
June & Henry
PG gallery192, Christchurch, NZ
5 March – 5 April 2024
Figures again roam dramatic landscapes. He imagines his ageing mother, June, making her way along the familiar routes of the Port Hills and Lyttelton Harbour, walking-stick in hand. Sometimes she has her great grandson Henry in tow. The two have never met. Through these expressive paintings Macleod reflects on life’s journey and how time and distance impact on intergenerational connections.
Also included in the show are beach scenes, some set in Canterbury, others in New South Wales.
FacingTime: Together and Apart - Portraits of Geoff by Euan Macleod
New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Te Pūkenga Whakaata, Wellington, NZ
15 June - 10 September 2023
FacingTime: Portraits of Geoff by Euan Macleod, is an allegory on isolation, loss, technology and most importantly friendship created during the Covid-19 lockdown. The series of 321 portraits depicts fellow artists Euan Macleod and Geoff Dixon’s daily communication on FaceTime, a godsend for so many isolated by the onset of the pandemic. Their connections and disconnections, are now archived under a marriage of the historic ethic of painting and cell phone technology. The new way we talk.
Summit Road
King Street Gallery
9 May - 3 June 2023
Considering the vast body of work collectively, at least before a tighter selection can be made, there are notes of intense drama (as we expect), yes, but tempered with works that are more gently, rather beautiful melancholy, in the place that might normally be reserved for anxious brooding or a dark existential rage. Is this a reprieve after a period of tumult? Perhaps these works represent a tentative step toward a place of acceptance, or at least understanding, of the fragility of life and the profound depth of feeling that comes of reflecting upon these moments
Euan Macleod – Memories of Forgetting
Niagara Galleries,
Richmond, VIC
9 February – 5 March 2022
Niagara Galleries is delighted to present Memories of Forgetting, Euan Macleod's latest exhibition of recent paintings, the majority of which were completed in 2021; the same year that the artist won the Dobell Drawing Prize and was a finalist in The Archibald Prize.
Personal Symbols that have recurred in Macleod's work throughout his career, including colossal, shadowy figures are met with identified individuals in his expressive paintings, drawn from recent observations of the landscape of his youth in New Zealand.
oil on polyester 120x84cm
oil on polyester 120x84cm
oil on polyester 120x84cm
Hold Fast
Bowen Galleries, Wellington, NZ
12 July – 1 August 2021
Hold Fast, while referencing the tight
grip on the rope, also happens to be the Macleod family motto. I have held this familial bond closely throughout my life, sometimes grasped tautly and with full awareness, and other times unthinkingly, loosely.
It is there supporting me through tough times, the steep uphill climbs and deep chasms, but also present at the peaks of life, when mountains have been summited.
Bridget Macleod
Plein Air - 3:33 Art Projects Young Curators Program
Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, Wahroonga, NSW
30 March – 14 April 2022
Young Curators have focused on Euan MacLeod's practice of plain air, selecting more than 60 paintings and drawings. These works are taken from Hong Kong and China, visits home to New Zealand and Australian beach holidays. Along with these works is a series that reflect on the development of MacLeod's ideas from sketch, to print and to canvas.
3:33 Art Projects Young Curators Program with Abbotsleigh School and Hornsby Girls’ High School
oil polyester 75x116cm
oil polyester 75x116cm
Lessons in Isolation
PG gallery192, Christchurch, NZ
23 March – 10 April 2021
These recent canvases are an inversion of that desert painter of 2010. In an alpine environment reminiscent of Aotearoa, with last summer’s stained ice and snow in evidence, Macleod’s protagonist now finds himself confronted by memories of the burning continent of his ‘other life’. The campfire that warms him is one manifestation of the flammable Australian flora.
Gregory O'Brien
oil on polyester 56x76cm
oil on polyester 100x124cm
oil polyester 120x84cm
oil on polyester 56x76cm
Figure in a dissolving landscape
King Street Gallery on William, Sydney
1 – 26 September 2020
Euan and well known New Zealand photographer Craig Potton spent a few nights together near the top of the Tasman Glacier early this year. This is an extract from what is hoped will be a book and joint exhibition of their work based on the Southern Alps of New Zealand.
acrylic on polyester 100 x 124cm
acrylic on polyester 100 x 124cm
oil on acrylic on polyester 150x180cm
acrylic on polyester 100 x 124cm
Swing/Bridge
Watters Gallery, Sydney
5 – 30 September 2017
Earlier this year New Zealand achieved a legal first when, after much consultation with Maori groups, ‘legal
personhood’ was accorded to the Whanganui River, 200km north of Wellington. The waterway now has the right to be represented in a court of law. Therein lies a proof that, in fundamental ways, we can change the terms upon which we engage with the environment. Such an acknowledgement that humanity is umbilically linked not only to water, but also to soil and air and a broader concept of nature, has been at the heart of Euan Macleod’s painterly project for the over three decades now.
acrylic on polyester 100 x 124cm
acrylic on polyester 84 x 100cm
oil on polyester 100 x 124cm
acrylic on polyester 100 x 124cm
A backward glance
Bowen Galleries,Wellington, NZ
3 – 29 April 2017
A tour of Fiordland in 2015 further enhanced his evolving vision of southern New Zealand. For Macleod, as for any artist worth their salt, contemplating these landscapes becomes, inadvertently, a process of looking backwards into history—to the Fiordland visited by Captain Cook in the late 18th century, to Shotover River during its gold-mining heyday, and also to the settlements and seasonal routes of Ngai Tahu over many centuries.
Gregory O'Brien
acrylic on polyester 124 x 100cm
oil on polyester 111 x 167cm
oil on acrylic on polyester 180 x 150cm
acrylic on polyester 124 x 100cm