Kim Pieters (born 1959) is a New Zealand painter, musician and digital filmmaker.

Background

Born in

Rotorua Rotorua () is a city in the Bay of Plenty region of New Zealand's North Island. The city lies on the southern shores of Lake Rotorua, from which it takes its name. It is the seat of the Rotorua Lakes District, a territorial authority encompass ...

, New Zealand, she was the eldest of six children and grew up on the

Bombay Hills The Bombay Hills are a range of hills to the south of Auckland, New Zealand. Though only a small and seemingly insignificant range of hills, they lie at the southern boundary of the Auckland region, and serve as a divide between Auckland and th ...

. In the early 1980s, she led a peripatetic life, traveling to Australia and around New Zealand. She moved to Christchurch in the late 1980s and, without any significant formal training, "devoted herself to her art practice". She held her first exhibition of photographs and drawings in Wellington in 1981, and her first painting exhibition at the

Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery The Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery, was an art gallery in the Christchurch Central City, central city of Christchurch, New Zealand. It consisted of two buildings built in the late 1800s. The buildings were demolished in 2012 due to damage fro ...

in 1989. In 1993, along with others such as the musician

Peter Stapleton Peter James Stapleton (25 April 1954 – 22 March 2020) was a musician from New Zealand who was best known as the drummer and co-founder of the alternative rock band The Terminals. Stapleton was also a member of the groups Vacuum, The Pin Group, ...

, she relocated to Dunedin where she participated in the city's "‘free noise’ scene", and was instrumental in establishing the Metonymic record label (1996) and the experimental film and music festival Lines of Flight (2000). She took up residence in her current studio near the Dunedin waterfront in 2007, which initiated "an especially concentrated period of painting".

Work

Involved in a number of different media, and a long-standing fixture on the experimental music scene, she, nonetheless, describes painting as her "ultimate life choice". The origins of this choice date back to when, as a child of ten, she was encouraged by her aunt to make images as an afternoon project. Pieters recalls this moment as a "numinous" experience. "Making a picture" creates a state of mind, in her words, in which "everything falls away." She explains that " inting is where my attention is completely absorbed....I am happiest when I am painting." She elaborates: "When I paint I am looking to hold the unsayable....For me, abstraction is intimately tied to ideas of experience and language. The most curious, the most wonderful thing – but perhaps also the most terrifying – is that which we can’t name. This is where everything begins for me."

Critical reception

Pieters won the

Waikato Museum Waikato Museum ( mi, Te Whare Taonga o Waikato) is a regional museum located in Hamilton, New Zealand. The museum manages ArtsPost, a shop and gallery space for New Zealand art and design. Both are managed by the Hamilton City Council. Outside ...

’s National Contemporary Art Award in 2017 for her painting "The Meaning of Ethics" (2017, mixed media on board). Elizabeth Caldwell, director of the City Gallery in Wellington and judge for the award commented: "The work draws on a tradition of stylistic abstract painting. As a judge, one of the things I look for is originality and a signature style. Kim Pieters is an artist who uses her own vocabulary of gestures in her art-making. She has got complete mastery of her craft." Pieters' work has been widely exhibited in New Zealand in galleries such as:

Artspace NZ Artspace Aotearoa (previously known as Artspace NZ) is an art gallery in Auckland, New Zealand. It is located on Karangahape Road in Newton. The gallery was founded in 1987, and focuses on contemporary New Zealand and overseas art. It should no ...

(2012), the

Adam Art Gallery Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as " ...

(2014)
Inge Doesburg Gallery
(2016), the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2018)
Bowerbank Ninow
(2016, 2018) and RDS Gallery (2019).

References

External links

Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pieters, Kim 1959 births Living people People from Rotorua New Zealand painters New Zealand women painters