Main Gallery
6 March - 1 April

Artist Talk 11am 6 March

Ron Hall has been involved with the visual arts as an artist and art educator for the last 30 years and currently works full time out of his studio in Te Aroha.

Hall’s main art practice over the last 20 years has been with formalist art assemblages involving the deconstruction and reconstruction of beehives. This art is a serious visual statement challenging the American modernist art movement ‘Abstract Expressionism’.

“In American Abstract Expressionism the mark making was always carefully considered and the artists were always self aware, whereas my art work expresses the irony of using untrained naive industrial beehive painters as a basis for fine art. The weathered wood from the beehives reveal opaque and transparent paint layers that are randomly altered by the weather conditions. This painterly randomness is further developed when the beehives are dipped in wax and thrown around on trucks.

In my beehive assemblages I mediate purposely, between this naivety and the considered. Aesthetically I am recognising and celebrating the unexpected poetic beauty in the paint work. The art work quite often has a melancholic beauty characteristic of the beehive degeneration.” 

Hall’s recent art work takes a new direction with an exploration of more complex shapes. He acknowledges the influence of artists such as Don Driver, Michael Hight, Mondrian, Diebenkorn, and Rosalie Gascoigne on this series of work.