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.

Roger Hickin

Roger Hickin was born in Invercargill in 1951. His first love was poetry and he spent some time with James K. Baxter at Jerusalem. He also worked with Dunedin artist Ralph Hotere, making the distinctive frames for many of Hotere’s stainless steel works. It was the seemingly simple act of reorganising the two right angle corners of a frame into the shape of a cross that first inspired his own work as a visual artist. Over the past two decades he has exhibited throughout the country with works held in major collections in Auckland, Christchurch, Rotorua and Wanganui. Roger Hickin now lives and works in Governor’s Bay, Christchurch.

In the drink inside the empty bottle (2008) Hickin uses the singular lines of graphite on acrylic to pare down memory and personal experience to an austere yet evocative symbolism. The simple lines of bottle, glass and counter are drawn against a more complex background of white acrylic scraped back to allow the black underpainting to shadow the forms in a muted reference to the darker history of personal addiction. The resulting works are poignant still lifes, redolent of the simplicity of Giorgio Morandi’s modest lines and the unsettled hues of Alberto Giacometti’s still lifes. The correlation of light and dark, line and shadow, can be seen as metaphors for death (the past, the addiction) and new life.

"[His] works inhabit – and are inhabited by – silence" – David Howard, Art New Zealand

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