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.
From her earliest surviving work, ‘Self Portrait at 16, 1977’, Viky Garden has consistently challenged the assumption that portraiture is no longer relevant in contemporary art. 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.
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.
Garden’s most recent exhibition at Fe29, GRIT, is an eloquent, yet unapologetic exploration of the physical and emotional challenges faced by women as they transition through menopause. The paintings negotiate the halfway point between the awe-inspiring and the often-shocking changes that invariably lead to re-evaluations of identity and purpose. To illustrate this point, Garden uses the wooden ends of redundant paintbrushes and bits of card to push the paint onto the canvas, employing swatches, streaks and splashes of colour to link each work in a three decades-long journey that is so fluid that her subjects can embody all ages interchangeably.
She also 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.
To see more of Garden’s work, link to Viky Garden’s Miniature Paintings, Photographs and Monotypes