JS05.05 

AWO.02.05

JS05.05 is a new body of work from Christchurch artists Aaron and Hannah Beehre. Tag-team collaborators - Aaron the designer, Hannah the painter - their works have always danced around the lines of graphic design, and painting within the white walls of the gallery. Best known for their abstract graphic style this most recent offering has the unexpected introduction of the figure, realistic hummingbirds and orchid flowers caught within a techno-landscape of lyrical geometric shapes. There is a sense of the still moving, of graphic codes and painterly patterns emerging to suggest an underlying organic order, or the perpetual rotation of a screensaver. Hummingbird and orchid inhabit a hybrid of real and virtual space. While intensely crafted (Hannah’s patience with surface and finish is immaculate), these works are charged with energy. There is a generosity that is playful and full of narrative potential. The Beehre palette is rich, sumptuous even. The hummingbirds are suspended in time, caught in mid-flight with further action elsewhere, just beyond the frame. These are starting points in which to draw stories from.

The Beehres have always been playful, offering us intensity and a commitment to detail that is presented within the currency of youthful consumption, culture and style – a sense of pop, of the market driven and the temporal. For the future is quickly upon us (is it not?), and these works revel in their own use-by-date.

Selected works

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Hannah Beehre would like to acknowledge the support of the Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation.