Max Gimblett in conversation
New Zealand-born painter, Max Gimblett, has spent the major part of his career in the United States, however he maintains close links with the Pacific and regularly travels to Asia. Both his abstract canvases and his works on paper have received considerable recognition in his country of origin, in Australia and in the United States. Since the early 1970s, Gimblett has held regular solo exhibitions, including Transformation at Auckland Art Gallery (1984), Crossing Fill Tilt at Horodner Romley Gallery, New York (1992), and numerous shows at Haines Gallery, San Francisco, at Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland and Jensen Gallery, Wellington.
In Australia, Gimblett is represented in the collections of Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Queensland Art Gallery. What emerges from the following discussion is a description of a deeply personal involvement with artistic production which takes its impetus from European and post-war American modernism and also from an identification with strands of Eastern mysticism.
Anne Kirker: Max, what do you believe are the constants in your work, now that you've been single-mindedly painting for some three decades?
Max Gimblett: Included in such constants would be—a belief that content creates form; drawing as the centre of my visual language; archetypal shape as alchemical container; and symbolism, in that I am attempting to refresh and charge with new meanings symbols and signs that may communicate across cultural boundaries. There is also the repetition of motif as part of subject matter; a suspension of gravity and a floating state between timelessness and time; a calligraphic practice with Zen states of 'instant/gradual' and 'all-mind/ no-mind'. These are some of the constants.
John Yau writes that I paint in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline