Glen Hayward

Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 12:30pm
Aotearoa Art Fair, PAULNACHE
STAND C7

Glen Hayward’s work blends carving, painting and conceptualism to snare the viewer in a standoff around what is real or illusionary, art or not art, profound or absurd.

Featured at the Fair for its Auckland debut, is a new body of work based on Hayward’s travel to some of the world’s major galleries. Rather than profound art experiences, Hayward walked away with bad photographs of fixings such as the gold drinking fountains and handrails from the Guggenheim Museum, and the ceiling pipes in Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room. He later remakes these objects out of wood in his Whanganui studio. The project put a new twist on Hayward’s interest in redeploying the objects that are encountered in and/or put to work in the art gallery, which allows him to tease out the behaviours and experiences they engender, and then question how this all intersects with ‘the real world’. These sculptures are neither (or both) here or there, functional or dysfunctional.

Hayward’s work constantly forces us to look and think again. It offers a kind of everyday mysticism, challenging us to trust in or doubt the validity of the objects or experiences that we encounter in the here and now—especially inside the art gallery but also in the world beyond it.

We warmly welcome you to join in the conversation with artist Glen Hayward and City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi curator Aaron Lister, following the exhibition and publication  ‘Wish You Were Here’, supported by Chartwell Trust and City Gallery Wellington Foundation.