International Art Centre Welcomes Donna Demente Mon, 31 Aug 2009
International Art Centre Welcomes Donna Demente
It is with great pleasure that we welcome well known, Oamaru based artist Donna Demente as a resident artist. Three works currently on view in the gallery typically reflect her incorporation of classic elements and quattrocento influences in a fresh and original way. Donna has enjoyed much success over the years. She has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand, been commissioned by Te Papa and had a long association with the Wearable Arts Awards. Demente's work will be included in our annual Summer Exhibition which opens 10 December 2009.
Demente is an artist who lives her life as art itself. After two years studying at Elam, Demente chose to pursue her creative development in the South Island, moving first to Dunedin and then settling in the creative community of Oamaru. Here she embarked on a role of actively reviving the civic culture of this historic town.
Demente established the annual Mid-Winter Masquerade and set up the Whitestone Artists' Collective and Grainstore Gallery. Even her home environment has been described as a mix of drama, pre-Raphaelitism, taxidermy and metaphysics.
Like her cultural activities, Demente's art finds expression across a range of forms and mediums. Always conveying an affinity with the past, Demente has become renowned for her close-up portraiture with a predominant focus on the eyes. The eyes are the artist's signature motif, playing the role of guardian looking over the viewer. Never specific yet full of individual character, the eyes not only create an interaction between the art and the viewer but a dialogue between the works themselves.
Donna's eyes are always distinctive, yet they exude a sense of the familiar. Aspects of the Byzantine and elements of Renaissance classicism are clear, for this is an artist who wears her artistic influences on her sleeve. Demente's work is also firmly placed in the present however with her flattened picture plane and isolation of the face - whether that is in painted form, her Venetian style paper-mache masks or her exquisitely painted ostrich eggs. Demente's assiduous research is overt, but her art is never an exercise in imitation or pastiche.
Demente draws her influences heavily from pre-20th Century European art, from a time before art became an individualist critique of society. The artists and art movements that influenced Demente all played an integral part in their society, a goal she strives to achieve in her own practice.
Since 1990, Demente has held many solo exhibitions in galleries nationwide, including the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (1993), the Eastern Southland Public Gallery (1992 and 1994), Robert McDougall Gallery in Christchurch (1995), Forrester Gallery, Oamaru (1996 and 1998), and the Aigantighe Gallery in Timaru (1997).
A commission was received from Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand in 2001. In 2005 Demente was awarded the Telecom white pages arts award for the Oamaru / Timaru region. Several works are held in the collection of the Wearable Arts Museum in Nelson and have toured internationally. Her works are held in Government House, Te Papa, Forrester Gallery collection, and the Eastern Southland Gallery Collection.
