Sunday 28th January
12pm| FREE
Alan Ibell’s paintings take on the form of an object upon which to meditate, providing a space for contemplation. They are stages on which it seems events have just occurred, or in which the action is seemingly waiting in the wings for its cue. The paintings convey at once a sense of stark isolation as well as a potent possibility. Ibell is interested in images that express a kind of poetry that, coupled with the paintings title present the viewer with a visual experience that often plays out as a riddle or double entendre. In this floor talk, Ibell will walk you through his works on display as part of Strange Friends, and speak to the loaded literary connections and pop music references made in these works.
Alan Ibell is a painter based in Aotearoa/New Zealand (b. Ōtautahi/ Christchurch). He studied Painting at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in Ōtepoti/Dunedin. Alan spent several years in Melbourne, Australia before returning to NZ in 2016. He is currently based in Papaioea/Palmerston North.
Ibell is interested in painting as narrative and uses figuration as a way to convey a poetic or abstract visual experience. To this end he casts imagery from dreams, memories, personal anxieties and existential musings into the works to create absurd human narratives about transition and the search for fulfilment, be it spiritual or other.
Ibell has been a finalist in New Zealand’s longest running art award the Wallace Art Awards (2018, 2016 and 2009) and received 1st prize in the City of Dunedin Art Awards (Dunedin, NZ-2010) and 1st prize in the Edinburgh Realty Art Award (Dunedin, NZ-2009). He has work included in three publications 20 / 20: Twenty Artists / Twenty Writers (2017), 20 / 20: Twenty Artists / Twenty Writers (2015) and The Artists: 21 Practitioners in New Zealand Contemporary Art c. 2013-2015 (2013).