City Art is a conservation framing workshop and gallery offering a range of museum-standard picture framing and art care services to artists, art collectors, museums and galleries.

Allen Cox

The luminous canvases of US artist Allen Cox are renowned for their vivid explorations of mythology, history, personal memory and nature, alluding to his years as an anthropologist and his interest in "the patina of experience" left on timeworn artefacts. Ten years ago Allen and his wife Ilsa came to Christchurch for a two-year academic tenure. Inspired by the different light and colour of the South Island, as well as the high-calibre international contemporary art scene that he found here, Allen now continues to return to, and exhibit in, Christchurch. 

As a contemporary painter, Cox's work is abstract but also illusionistic, surreal and atmospheric, using layers of colour and light to capture the expansive isolation of natural and urban landscapes. In Small Histories (2003), Allen's first exhibition in New Zealand, he combined an almost whimsical focus on frail domesticity – the chair, the building – with more robust organic elements – stems, seeds and leaves. This combination flickers light on our history – the voyage by sea, the flora of a new land, the emerging pride of a new people, blending into a landscape bathed in the startling and beautiful luminosity of this work. In id est we find a closer inspections of these...

Gallery:

Peter Adsett
Mark Braunias
Marcus Capes
Peter Carson
Stephen Clarke
Allen Cox
Michael Dell
Andrew Drummond
Guy Frederick
Michael Hamblett
Jeffrey Harris
Roger Hickin
Maree Horner
Kathryn Madill
Michael Reed
Zina Swanson
Philip Trusttum