Composite presents a focused body of work by Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist Ruth Cleland. Known for her unusual combination of photorealist paintings and highly refined abstractions, this is Cleland’s first solo presentation in Kirikiriroa.

While Cleland typically provides few clues for the locations depicted in her works, the connecting thread between each artwork in this exhibition is a single site, a local supermarket, where the artist has periodically returned over the past decade.

The exhibition traverses an array of carefully framed scenes – from carparks to hallways to details of floors – and the focus on a single site provides a unique vantage point from which to both register the incremental changes in the seemingly generic spaces of the supermarket and track the subtle evolution of Cleland’s practice over a sustained period.
 

Banal workaday surfaces of tile, terrazzo and concrete are transformed by Cleland’s time and attention, as marks, scuffs, aggregate flecks and light reflections resolve into unexpected visual fields. These paintings sit alongside geometric gridworks – compositional mappings that echo and respond to the adjacent image.

Composite is not simply a study in observation, but in repetition and devotion. It asks us to consider how we define value, subject, spectacle, and beauty. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue written by Lucinda Bennett. Ruth Cleland is represented by Sumer https://sumer.nz

Ruth Cleland (born 1976, Kirikiriroa Hamilton) currently lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1998 and a Master of Fine Arts (with distinction) in 2002 from the Dunedin School of Art, specialising in printmaking. Cleland has exhibited nationally and internationally in private galleries as well as public art institutions, and has won several awards, including the Park Lane Wallace Trust Development Award (2008) and the NZ Painting and Printmaking Award (2003).