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.

Maree Horner

South Taranaki artist Maree Horner completed a degree in sculpture at the Elam School of Fine Arts in 1974. After a period of travel she settled in South Taranaki where she continues to work as an artist and art teacher. From her earlier site specific, environmental and installation work in the 1970s and ‘80s, Horner began exploring painting and printmaking. She has exhibited widely throughout the North Island.

Her “Eternal Realities” series focusses on the male and female, outdoor and indoor, animate and inanimate dichotomies. Unlike many of Horner’s earlier works, with their monumental architectural imagery, scale here is more subtle – the donkey is shrunk to a size that allows it to stand in the empty fireplace or a circular pool in an obscene but unsurprising domination of the demure paraphernalia of the home landscape. The donkey seems to fit, its association with farmyard scenery and animal husbandry adding a weird logic to these stagey tableaux. The donkey is a symbol of unthinking animality – stubborn, irrational, loud. In these works, however, the symbol of the donkey is undeniably sexual. Each small engraving uses the idea of the female receptacle  – the open drawer, the welcoming armchair, the empty box – as symbols of feminine domesticity and sexual acquiescence. Within these soft interiors the brutish act of a domesticated animal pawing back the bedspread, mounting the chair or muddying the para pool is both repellant and restrained, a static performance of sexual infiltration both monstrous and quietly acceptable.

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