Selected Recent Exhibitions
“The Open Door”
Gow Langsford Gallery
Onehunga
July 26-August 16, 2025
Gow Langsford Gallery
4 Princes Street, Onehunga
Auckland 1061, New Zealand
“Hands of Gold”
Gow Langsford Gallery
Auckland City
June 5-29, 2024
Gow Langsford Gallery
28-36 Wellesley Street East, Auckland Central
1010, New Zealand
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
This depth of underlying philosophical thought opens up an array of interpretive possibilities. A viewer can engage with them as meditations on the human condition, as richly emotional works of expressionism, or as satisfying works of abstraction with a unique aesthetic. However one chooses to engage with Gimblett’s work, its quality is undeniable.
Gow Langsford is delighted to present Hands of Gold, an exhibition of new works by Max Gimblett. Hands of Gold features a stunning array of paintings, the majority of which take the quatrefoil shape – a hallmark of Gimblett’s oeuvre. While this essential form repeats, the treatment of surface varies considerably from work to work. There are evenly surfaced monochromes, grid-like patterns, and extravagantly gestural brush strokes in a rich array of colours. What shines through in this diverse range of approaches to painting is the quality of Gimblett’s craft and his distinctive artistic vision.
Bienvenu Steinberg & J
New York
May 23 - June 23, 2024
Bienvenu Steinberg & C 35 Walker St
New York, NY 10013
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Bienvenu Steinberg & J is honored to present The Alchemist, a show of recent paintings by Max Gimblett. The exhibition’s focus is on the 88-year-old artist’s iconic quatrefoil canvases that are noteworthy both for the spiritual universality of their form and for their sumptuous use of color, light, and precious metals. In a text addressed to the artist, Lewis Hyde, scholar and essayist, writes, “You take gold to be a sign of consciousness, of alchemical transformation, of the precious and sublime…The precious metal in your work is to be understood spiritually, not literally; it bespeaks the promise of psychic transformation and healing. It is a joining of opposites.”
The Alchemist is the artist’s first solo appearance in New York in more than a decade. Born in New Zealand in 1935, Gimblett traveled extensively before settling in New York in 1972. His work draws on a broad range of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual traditions that overarch the divisions between East and West. Beginning in 1983, and continuing today, Gimblett’s practice deploys the gestural dynamics of both Abstract Expressionism and Zen calligraphy onto richly layered and endlessly diverse metallic quatrefoil surfaces. While continuing to create paintings in a broad range of formats Max Gimblett’s evocation of the quatrefoil as a signifier of spirituality calls to mind the symbol’s presence in myriad cultures ranging from Buddhist mandalas to Christian rose windows. According to Chris Saines, Director of the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, “A Gimblett quatrefoil makes a contemporary object of that historic space then shifts its meaning at the surface, searching for the particular in the face of the universal.”
Max Gimblett is a painter, calligrapher, and Rinzai Zen monk. Gimblett’s paintings are a harmonious postmodern synthesis of American and Japanese art. Often working on shaped panels or canvases – tondos, ovals, and his signature four-lobed quatrefoil – he marries Abstract Expressionism, Modernism and Spiritual Abstraction with mysticism and traditions of Asian calligraphy. Masterful brushwork, an eccentric and sophisticated color sense and sensuously lush surfaces are punctuated with gilding in precious metals – a nod to alchemy, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland (in which he was raised) and Japanese lacquerware, ceramics and temple art.
Born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1935, Max Gimblett studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1960s and has since traveled, taught and exhibited extensively across the globe. Gimblett’s work is included in major museum collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki.
Hosfelt Gallery
San Francisco
February 11 – April 1, 2023
Hosfelt Gallery
260 Utah Street
San Francisco
CA 94103
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
In the spirit of impermanence — one of the core precepts of Buddhism—artworks in this solo show of the work of the 87-year-old Rinzai Zen monk Max Gimblett will rotate in and out of the galleries throughout the run of the exhibition. Viewers, if they visit the gallery repeatedly, will find a completely different installation of new work each time they return.
Gimblett’s paintings are a unique and mindful hybrid of the New York school of abstract expressionism with traditions of manuscript illumination and icon painting, Asian calligraphy, kintsugi, and lacquerware. Masterful brushwork, an eccentric and sophisticated color sense, and sensuously glossy surfaces are punctuated with precious metals. Some of the sculptural panels – tondos, ovals, and his signature four-lobed quatrefoil – are completely and idiosyncratically gilded in various types of gold or platinum, referring to the universality of devotional objects. With these very contemporary works, his intention is the marriage of Modernism with mysticism. Every work in this exhibition is an altarpiece; each is an offering.
Born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1935, Gimblett trained at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1960s and has since lived, studied, traveled, taught, and exhibited extensively across the globe. His work is included in major museum collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki. In 2022, The Getty Research Institute’s internationally renowned Artist’s Book Collection acquired the entire archive of Gimblett’s artist’s books, consisting of more than 250 unique sketchbooks and journals.
Gow Langsford Gallery
Auckland City
August 24—September 19, 2022
Gow Langsford Gallery
28-36 Wellesley Street East, Auckland Central
1010, New Zealand
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Max Gimblett is a national taonga. Having moved to New York in 1972 as a young adult, he has maintained strong ties with his homeland while building a life for himself in the USA. In normal times he would spend around a month of every year in Aotearoa, visiting more than 55 times since 1959. His last visit was in 2019
Despite the turmoil of recent years, as many artists have found, periods of confinement and restriction have had an unexpected impact on his studio practice. Without the distractions and the usual pressures of everyday life, Max Gimblett found renewed focus and ways of engaging with his practice. He was re-energized, and ultimately found this time highly productive. Inherent in this exhibition are the impacts of a culmination of changes over the last three years, in particular a new studio and newfound methods of working, both on his own and with his assistants.
Page Galleries, Wellington
April 26, 2022
Page Galleries
42 Victoria Street
Wellington 6011
New Zealand
info@pagegalleries.nz.co
+ 64 4 471 2636
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
There sometimes appear ms to be many Gimbletts: one is an extroverted colourist, another pursues the subtle luminous effects of gilded and lacquered surfaces. Gimblett brushes with all things: sacredness and passion; violence, sacrifice, and death; fear and awe; beauty, pleasure, peace, and joy.
—Wystan Curnow, Max Gimblett: The Brush of all Things, Auckland Art Gallery, 2004
This exhibition is not intended as a survey, rather an opportunity to consider an archive of works made over a period of more than thirty years. Many of these works have never been shown, instead carefully tucked away, waiting for the right moment.. Each work captures something of a particular time; while tracing gestures, forms, colours, and theories that Max Gimblett has returned to throughout a decades long practice. Collectively, these works reflect the many lives and legends that surround the artist.
Born in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau in 1935, and based in New York since 1972, Max Gimblett has long been devoted to the notion of the archive. The Getty Research Institute recently acquired an anthology of over 250 of the artist’s books, gifted by the artist and his wife, scholar, and curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.
“I’ve been making [these books] since 1963. There are some I’ve worked in for fifty plus years and they are astonishing. Travel journals, sketchbooks, journals, artist’s books made in collaboration with amazing poets and writers, other painters ... These books are made up of ink drawings, collages, gilding with precious metals, and stampings and have been bound by four different bookbinders over the years,” says Gimblett.
The exhibition takes its title from The Legend of the Ceramic Master, which speaks to a defining period in the artist’s life. The work acknowledges Ukrainian Canadian ceramic artist Roman Bartkiw, who twenty-seven-year-old Gimblett visited at his Toronto workshop in 1962, immediately agreeing to a two-year apprenticeship. It was the following year that Gimblett met his future wife, who was instrumental in Gimblett first identifying himself as an artist. The couple soon moved to San Francisco where Gimblett studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute while Kirshenblatt completed a BA and an MA at the University of California, Berkeley before they eventually arrived in New York via Bloomington Indiana, and Austin, Texas.
Gimblett quickly established a studio and the couple immersed themselves in the bustling New York art scene, living and working in The Bowery on the Lower East Side, a refuge to many artists and artist studios. In a recent publication documenting the history of the area, the couple reflected on their forty-four years there, writing “The Bowery was a paradox, at once victim and beneficiary of the city’s downturn. Undaunted by the dangers of the neighbourhood, artists moved into lots left vacant by manufacturers who had left the city.”
All the works in the exhibition were born of this setting. Some make broader allusions to religion, death, and spirituality; embodying a certain heroism not only in scale but in the resplendent gilding of precious metals, lending the works an alchemical connection to the divine. Others further reference personal biography and significant figures who have influenced the artist, including Sōtō Zen priest Great Dragon Michael Wenger, who gifted Gimblett his own personal zen kōan or statement; “at every step the pure wind rises.” Spirituality has long been essential to Gimblett. A long-time practitioner of Buddhism, Gimblett took his vows as a Rinzai Zen priest in 2006. “I believe in karma. I believe that I’ve had many lives, and this is a result of those. This life is an accumulation.”
Gow Langsford Gallery
Auckland City
February 17 – March 13, 2021
Gow Langsford Gallery
28-36 Wellesley Street East, Auckland Central
1010, New Zealand
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
In The Path of Light, esteemed contemporary painter and calligrapher Max Gimblett’s vibrant energy plays out across the surface of his canvases. Punctuations of gilding in precious metals, for which the artist is well-known, are suggestive of alchemy and both western and non-western religious beliefs. The use of gold, in particular, has a long history which dates back to Egyptian tomb reliefs and paintings. More recently, it has associations with honour, consciousness and enlightenment, which Gimblett draws upon, embracing its significance across cultures.
Key works in the exhibition, such as New Zealand – For Len Lye and Sea Change have a distinct relationship to our country, channeling tones of green and blue that Gimblett relates to our place in the Pacific. Sea Change, moreover, references Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest,’ with the lines “But doth suffer a sea-change. Into something rich and strange,” suggesting a substantial, holistic change in perspective, or metamorphosis. Other works, such as Altarand The Paths of Time, have a complex use of layering as the artist works into the surface time and time again.
In relation to his practice, Gimblett finds positives in the recent pandemic, mentioning that it has given him a concentrated period to focus on his work with no distractions. He recently shifted to a new studio space in New York, commenting that in doing so, he’s “shifted from an afternoon painter to a morning painter because of the direction of the east/west light. The light, both natural and electric, is much brighter in the new space.” Gimblett sees this impacting his work, increasing the ‘inner light’ of his paintings, evident in works such as Christ Risen.
Talking about the experience of viewing work, Gimblett discusses;
“Looking into a painting takes time. To move from the third dimension to the fourth and fifth, stand in front of the work and let it develop in your third eye and solar plexus. Don't rush this looking. Understanding painting is to increase and improve your inner life, to be an inspiration, although mute and silent, to speak. Be with the painting in all forms of natural light during the day and night. Have the faith that whatever you are thinking about and feeling in front of the painting is essential to your inner life.”
Accompanying Gimblett’s recent paintings is the release of a new series of unique screen prints. In bold, sophisticated tones, Gimblett works with screen printing techniques as he does painting. The artist responds to each layer as the work progresses, rather than working in large runs as the technique is more commonly employed. The result captures the vivacity of Gimblett’s works on canvas, and is an integral part of the artist’s drawing practice.
Gimblett lives and works in New York with the scholar, curator and writer Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, to whom he has been married for 56 years. He maintains a strong link to New Zealand where he was born and raised, travelling and making work here frequently over the past 40 years. His work is found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of American Art, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art of Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Gallery of New South Wales, the Auckland Art Gallery Toi ō Tamaki and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Due to Level 3 restrictions currently in place in Auckland, the scheduled opening for this exhibition on Tuesday 16th February has been cancelled. Further details on when the exhibition will be open to the public will be confirmed.
Gow Langsford Gallery
Auckland City
22 February- 18 March 2023, `
Gow Langsford Gallery
Kitchener St, Wellesley Gallery
Auckland, 1010
New Zealand
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
This exhibition is made up of a series of small new paintings by Max Gimblett. It encompasses his signature shaped canvas, the quatrefoil, along with Enso tondo works and rectangles in a mix of bright hues and reticent gold gilding. His unique blend of Eastern philosophy, calligraphy, and abstraction has made him one of this country’s most recognised and respected artists of his generation.
Hosfelt Gallery
San Francisco, CA
September 8 – October 10, 2020
Hosfelt Gallery
260 Utah Street
San Francisco
CA 94103
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Hosfelt Gallery presents a solo exhibition of work by the esteemed 84 year-old painter, calligrapher, and Rinzai Zen monk Max Gimblett.
Gimblett’s paintings are a harmonious, postmodern synthesis of American and Japanese art. Often working on shaped panels or canvases—tondos, ovals, and his signature four-lobed quatrefoil—he marries Abstract Expressionism, Modernism and Spiritual Abstraction with mysticism and traditions of Asian calligraphy. Gimblett’s paintings are defined by masterful brushwork combined with an eccentric and sophisticated color sense, and finished with sensuously glossy surfaces. They frequently incorporate gilding in precious metals—a nod to alchemy, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland (in which he was raised) and Japanese lacquerware, ceramics, and temple art.
Gimblett’s oeuvre encompasses a half-century practice of creating unique artist’s books as well as calligraphy-inspired ink paintings on paper. He is both a storyteller and a teacher who frequently guides workshops in traditional Sumi ink drawing and calligraphy techniques.
Born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1935, Gimblett trained at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1960s and has since lived, studied, traveled, taught, and exhibited extensively across the globe. His work is included in major museum collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki. Gimblett lives and works in New York and Auckland with the scholar, curator, writer and 2020 recipient of the prestigious Dan David Prize—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett—to whom he has been married for 56 years.
Christchurch Art Gallery
Te Puna o Waiwhetū
August 1 – November 15, 2020
Christchurch Art Gallery
312 Montreal Street
Christchurch Central City
Christchurch 8013, New Zealand
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“The inherent mystery of painting and drawing. It not being a skill or a talent but rather an enquiry, speculation, probing the depths, searching for a way into the plane. Whatever you are thinking, in Mind, becomes a translation when flattened into the plane, there is thinking in paint, in gesture, into the plane which is unlike any other activity in life. It is mute, silent, rather like being in the sea, under the surface, and looking upwards into the sun striking low through the waters.” —Max Gimblett (Max Gimblett: Ocean Wheel 1 August – 15 November 2020)
Page Galleries
Wellington, NZ
May 30 – June 20, 2020
Page Galleries
42 Victoria Street
Wellington 6011
New Zealand
info@pagegalleries.nz.co
+ 64 4 471 2636
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Leaves of Grass features a selection of works on paper from Max Gimblett’s archive.
There is an onslaught of vibrant, riotous colour, pattern, and texture in these works. The scale is human; gesture and movement is implicit. One can almost picture the way the artist’s body moves; see the raised arm, trace the paintbrush through the air and watch the ink splatter across the page. Great swathes of colour – yellow, purple, pink – inch out to the edge of the paper and beyond. There is a sense of release, freedom.
This exhibition borrows its title from a work of the same name which in turn recalls a collection of poetry by American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). While the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his life writing and re-writing the collection. This process of lifelong revision resulted in vastly different editions published over four decades—with the first a small book of just twelve poems and the last, a compilation of over four hundred.
Gimblett himself is constantly revising, revisiting. In these works we see the familiar motif of the quatrefoil, the wheel; subjects Gimblett returns to again and again, each repetition lending new life to their form. And like Whitman, whose poem I Sing the Body Electric exalts the human body and its relation to the soul, Gimblett aligns the mind and body through his practice, drawing on philosophies of Zen Buddhism rather than the traditional western division of mind-body dualism.