Douglas Stichbury & Tia Ansell | Auckland Art Fair 2021: Tāmaki Makaurau

In these paintings made for the Auckland Art Fair, New York based artist Douglas Stichbury continues to explore his interest in speculative 20th century science fiction.  Using industrial software Stichbury’s images are initially planned digitally through simulations, before being painted in dry brush oil on linen, a process inspired by Joan Miro’s raw linen paintings and brutalist abstract painting of the 1960s.   

The paintings on show are based on a concept for a film titled the Glass House by Sergei Eisenstein (a pioneering Soviet film director), which was pitched to Paramount Films in 1930 but never made. The premise for the film, set sometime in the future, revolved around a glass residential building with no privacy, a musing on the architecture of surveillance and control.    

Tia Ansell is a Melbourne based New Zealand artist whose practice combines both painting and weaving. Woven on a 4 or 6 shaft loom, and using a combination of threads such as cotton, linen, bamboo and silk to give different qualities of colour, texture and feel, woven surfaces provide the substrate for the painted surfaces.

The woven grids form the basis of Tia’s work, representing the urban landscapes of her neighbourhood in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Her painting represents snippets of her immediate surroundings; a shaft of light, a window frame or a shadow. Ansell’s aluminium frames, based on a museum storage tray, allow the weaving and painting to be reflected, extending the illusion of a repeated pattern.