Research Seminar: Cultures, Histories, Identities in Visual Studies Research Network 3 May 2023
Room F209, F Block, Otago Polytechnic, Forth Street, Dunedin: 5 – 7 pm
“Digit Painting – brown/purple over pink, 2022, by Noel Ivanoff”
Ed Hanfling, Dunedin School of Art
Noel Ivanoff, Digit Painting – brown/purple over pink, 2022, oil on plywood panel, 740 x 560 mm
This talk is an attempt to come to terms with one abstract painting by Auckland artist Noel Ivanoff, attending to the “touch” of the painter and (perhaps) having recourse to the seemingly unremarkable (but possibly contentious) notion of the artist’s personal sensibility, and (with some trepidation) placing Ivanoff’s work in relation to an unfurling tradition of abstract painting in New Zealand by male artists, notably Milan Mrkusich and Ian Scott.
Ed Hanfling is an art historian, critic and occasional curator, and a lecturer in art history and theory at the Dunedin School of Art. His research focuses on issues of judgement and value, modernist abstraction and twentieth-century art in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a co-author of 250 Years of New Zealand Painting (Bateman 2021), and has published books and/or articles on a succession of male abstract artists – Milan Mrkusich, Ian Scott, Morris Louis, Mervyn Williams, Roy Good, et al.
