4
Michael Hight 'Springburn'
Estimate:
$6,000 - $8,000
Sold
$8,500
Live Auction
Art For Good | A Collaborative Charity Art Auction Benefiting Kindness Collective
ARTIST
Michael Hight
Description
Michael Hight
Springburn, 2024
titled lower left, signed lower right
signed and dated verso
oil on linen
300 x 400mm
Artist information
Michael Hight
b. 1961, New Zealand
Lives in Auckland
Michael Hight is a self-taught painter who has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1980s. He is best known for his hyper-real paintings of beehives in the New Zealand landscape, which frequently depict locations in Central Otago and Canterbury. Hight’s more recent works include dark, surreal dreamscapes that weave in imagery of objects that are of personal significance to the artist. Toys, musical instruments, books, rusted corrugated iron and other such items are set in striking juxtaposition to rustic landscapes, often with dark skies above.
Hight’s engagement with the New Zealand landscape forms a commentary on human interaction with the geological environment. The ubiquitous beehive serves as a touchstone and a recurring motif, often suggesting an unseen human presence. In many of his works, the slow creep of natural decay alludes to an incremental but inevitable return to nature. This is subtly evident in the weathering of timber on beehives, in the rusting shells of scrapped cars, in collapsing walls of abandoned buildings. Hight’s paintings carry a sense of the uncanny, and a reminder of the vast discrepancies between human and geological time scales.
Hight has an exhibition history of more than 25 years. He continues to exhibit regularly in New Zealand and Australia. Highlights include inclusion in exhibitions at City Gallery, Wellington (2001 and 2007)—and his work is held in numerous public and private collections in New Zealand, and private collections in the UK, Germany, Italy, USA, Hong Kong and Australia. In 2014 Gow Langsford Gallery published his first monograph Michael Hight: Crossing the Line.
Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Michael Hight since 1987.
Springburn, 2024
titled lower left, signed lower right
signed and dated verso
oil on linen
300 x 400mm
Artist information
Michael Hight
b. 1961, New Zealand
Lives in Auckland
Michael Hight is a self-taught painter who has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1980s. He is best known for his hyper-real paintings of beehives in the New Zealand landscape, which frequently depict locations in Central Otago and Canterbury. Hight’s more recent works include dark, surreal dreamscapes that weave in imagery of objects that are of personal significance to the artist. Toys, musical instruments, books, rusted corrugated iron and other such items are set in striking juxtaposition to rustic landscapes, often with dark skies above.
Hight’s engagement with the New Zealand landscape forms a commentary on human interaction with the geological environment. The ubiquitous beehive serves as a touchstone and a recurring motif, often suggesting an unseen human presence. In many of his works, the slow creep of natural decay alludes to an incremental but inevitable return to nature. This is subtly evident in the weathering of timber on beehives, in the rusting shells of scrapped cars, in collapsing walls of abandoned buildings. Hight’s paintings carry a sense of the uncanny, and a reminder of the vast discrepancies between human and geological time scales.
Hight has an exhibition history of more than 25 years. He continues to exhibit regularly in New Zealand and Australia. Highlights include inclusion in exhibitions at City Gallery, Wellington (2001 and 2007)—and his work is held in numerous public and private collections in New Zealand, and private collections in the UK, Germany, Italy, USA, Hong Kong and Australia. In 2014 Gow Langsford Gallery published his first monograph Michael Hight: Crossing the Line.
Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Michael Hight since 1987.
