ARTIST TALK | from 5pm Saturday 20 September 2025

Simon Edwards has an uncanny knack for capturing the essence of the New Zealand countryside. His sensuous landforms, painted on an aluminium base, burn with an inner icy fire that defines the austere glory of the mountains.

The works are of specific place, but often reimagined by the artist.

Whereas Edwards has previously created imaginary landforms which evoked some representationalism from memory traces and the use of collage, here the artist has combined works on site with studio work to capture the spirit of the Southern Alps and high country. As Edwards himself puts it, the works "look into the space between plein air and studio painting, plein air being used to observe and record colours, compositions and landscape details, and the studio painting process to revise, remember and reimagine the landscape."¹

Edwards has long deliberately toyed with colour. His early works were largely monochromatic; later pieces added strong colour, before paring it back to a handful of jewel-like tones. In this latest display, the use of a wide palette has returned to excellent effect in works such as Castle Hill - Rock and Ice and Lake Light, in which the land glows with gemstone-like intensity.

The artist sees his work as being modernist,² but it is also heavily informed by the romantic painters of the 19th century. Constable and Friedrich have long been mentioned in assessing Edwards' art, and the artist himself has acknowledged Petrus van der Velden’s use of dark and light as "a fundamental" in his inspiration.³ In works such as Torlesse Traverse I the sense of the overpowering grandeur of the land is perhaps more reminiscent of the sweeping early American landscapes of Albert Bierstadt. In this piece and several other works, the power of the mountains is juxtaposed with the almost empyrean nature of the green, glacier-scoured valleys. This dichotomy is a newer feature in Edwards' work, and one which emphasises the artist's power in depicting the landscape to excellent effect. Despite this apparent American antecedent, Edwards' work retains a quintessentially New Zealand identity.

Simon's use of aluminium as a ground for his paintings give the works a deep glow. The reflective metallic base doubles the apparent depth of the work, adding an inner lustre which fosters an atmospheric resonance.

The artist adds layers of colour with a painterly panache, before pulling back the paint to produce a sense of mountains that have themselves been worn back by time to create an ancient, powerful land.

The hyperreal landscapes, their orogeny and tectonics, are a combination of the natural world and the skills of the artist. Simultaneously New Zealand landscape and imaginary dream-world, the images become a land of mystery and mythology, an antipodean Tír na nÓg or Arcadia.

1. Artist's statement, 2025.

2. Artist's notes, 2022.

3. The artist in conversation with Warren Feeney, "Artbeat" 2023. https://artbeat.org.nz/simon%20edwards-%20kekerengu%20dreamtime%20-%20sublime%20paintings.