Viky Garden was born in Wellington and currently lives in Auckland.
A finalist in the NZ Adam Portrait Awards in 1992, 2014 and 2016 and in the Parkin Drawing Awards in 2018, her work is held in private collections in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Canada, USA and Europe.
Garden has a consistent and focused body of work dating back 25 years. Almost exclusively using herself as the subject, she explores themes of impermanence, self-image, introspection and the female experience.
Garden’s use of shadow in a contemporary narrative – the Greek inspired silhouettes of her Passengers series (2009) and the reinvented darker nursery Nature-Nurture images (2010) – was her entrée into abstract portraiture, inviting a reconsideration of painting method and composition. While her early works were primarily in oil, in 2015 these were replaced by liquid acrylics and brushes replaced with bits of card – a new approach was born. Garden’s recent works offer a rich interplay between gestural mark-making and representation. Her lively brushstrokes simultaneously reveal and conceal the subject, achieving a fine balance that preserves their ambiguity.
The sheer concentration on her subject matter shows a remarkable discipline in Garden’s artistic practice, which is carried through to her work’s titles. Most works are described only by the month and year in which they were completed. This choice of marking time amplifies the transitory nature of one’s self, and the inevitability of change – ideas that are both personal to the artist and universally understood, locking together the maker and the viewer.
Garden’s work, whether it be painting, pinhole photography or sculpture, has, from the very beginning, engaged in a self-reflective study of the political sphere of womanhood, in which she uses her own body as a form of language. She credits her tutor, New Zealand artist Vivian Lynn, for instilling an awareness of feminist perspectives during her formative years in the late 1970s.
In her miniature portraits Garden makes use of the canvas selvage (material edge) as part of the work’s narrative, alluding to an approaching brink or limit. By eschewing traditional wooden stretchers commonly associated with portrait painting, Garden works against the conventional taut canvas surface, utilising the natural imperfections and inconsistencies of the fabric to emphasise themes of ageing and transition. These themes are also reflected in the frayed, raw, uneven and unravelling edges that surround each unframed portrait.
Mounted at a slight distance from the wall, these unstretched paintings appear to float or hover – creating their own shadow – an ephemeral effect that speaks to inevitable change through the passing of time.
Viky Garden Ikons
At a time when large-scale paintings are de rigueur in the art world, Garden has chosen to scale down. She scours second-hand shops for miniature frames from the 1970s (padded silk prints of classical masterpieces by Gainsborough et al.), which she disassembles and transforms into a series of ‘ready-mades’ called Ikons. There’s a sense of almost reckless abandon about her technique, pushing the limit of where the paint stops and the frame begins. The result is a collection of tiny enigmatic portraits barely contained within the frames they threaten to breach.
Garden doesn’t want you to stand back. By painting small, she invites you to look closer. These Ikon miniatures reference the Greek Orthodox/Roman Catholic iconography of her Greek/Polish heritage, while her larger works (Grit, Hot Flush) place the feminine within more traditional metallic pewter iconographic backgrounds. It’s a subtle Christian reference, but Garden’s paintings don’t pander to comfort or sentiment – there is no Christ or Madonna to be found here.
To see more of Garden’s work, link to Viky Garden’s Paintings, Photographs and Monotypes