Trish Clark Gallery
Auckland Art Fair 2018

36 years of high-level art world engagement underpins Trish Clark representing noted artists across media and generations. Trish Clark Gallery opened its central Auckland location at 1 Bowen Avenue in April 2014, marking 30 years since owner Trish Clark began her original gallery in Auckland’s High Street, having established a private dealership two years prior in 1982.

Then representing such artists as Gordon Walters, Milan Mrkusich, Billy Apple, Stephen Bambury and Julia Morison, Clark relinquished the gallery to raise her 3 children and turned to high-level art consultancy for 25 years. In 1988 she established the New Zealand Moet & Chandon Art Foundation, directing it for 9 years; she consulted to and grew significant private and corporate collections; she chaired Auckland Council’s Advisory Panel for Public Art 2009-2013; her Board role at NZ Maritime Museum since 2009 was instrumental in achieving a more sustainable future for the Museum in 2018.

Now representing 22 artists, senior and emerging, Trish Clark Gallery has also introduced a number of renowned international artists to the Australasian region, including Anthony McCall, Alfredo Jaar and Kimsooja.

While Trish Clark Gallery is strongly engaged with photography and moving image, her presentation for Auckland Art Fair counterpoints these aspects with other more viscerally experienced (by maker and audience) aspects of contemporary art under the rubric of ‘the haptic’.

The past century saw ‘the death of painting’ (initially proclaimed by Rodchenko and other Russian Constructivists in 1921) and yet its contemporary continuation seems assured; the ancient arts of working in glass and stone retain, in the right hands, a deeply contemporary edge; the immediacy of the artist’s hand revealed in drawing is both the most ancient of humankind’s artworks and a contemporary delight. Trish Clark’s booth employs this range of media in varied scale, delivering unexpected conversations between artists.