Chloe Summerhayes | Richard Elderton: {Suite}

On show in the lead up to Christmas are two emerging Ōtautahi Christchurch-based painters, Chloe Summerhayes and Richard Elderton. Friends and contemporaries, the pair studied at Ilam School of Fine Arts together – Summerhayes completing her MFA with distinction in 2022, and Elderton earning First Class Honours in Painting in 2020. Both artists are past recipients of the Sawtell-Turner Prize in Painting.

Chloe Summerhayes
Chloe Summerhayes is a bold new voice in contemporary painting. Working primarily in oil, Summerhayes’ paintings delve into themes of time, the body, and the unruly beauty of being human. Her “chaotic intuitive way of painting” - teamed with her obsessive desire to rework and reshape, disassemble and disrupt - results in paintings that are almost entirely constructed of incidental passages of abstraction.

Richard Elderton
Born in Jōetsu, Japan and raised in Whakatū Nelson, Richard Elderton brings a deeply personal bicultural lens to his practice as a painter. His meticulously rendered oil paintings – often based on his own photographs – evoke the stillness and subtle mystery of the natural world, blending Japanese aesthetic influences with the distinct landscape of Aotearoa.