Viky Garden was born in Wellington and currently lives in Auckland. A finalist in the NZ Adam Portraiture Award in 1992, 2014 and 2016, the Parkin Drawing Award 2018 and 2019, the Aesthetica Creative Works Award UK in 2011 and winner of international awards for her pinhole photography in Barcelona, Spain, 2018 and 2020, her work is held in private collections in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Canada, USA and Europe and in the permanent collection of Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Auckland Museum, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Garden has a consistent and focused body of work dating back 35 years. Almost exclusively using herself as the subject, she explores themes of impermanence, self-image, introspection and the female experience.
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, prints, 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 monotypes originate from a specific paintings. These monotypes are reverse printed by hand onto high quality watercolour paper. Parts of the image are revealed to create a whole new work of art – in this way, art informs itself into a whole new discipline. No two monotypes are the same, each is a unique print.