Courtesy: the artist and Page Galleries, Wellington.

Page Galleries presents an exhibition of work by Derek Cowie.

Cowie lives and paints in Pōneke Wellington. Cowie’s work is represented in several public collections including Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The artist exhibited with Peter McLeavey Gallery throughout the 1980s before moving to London where he worked as a scenic painter for the National Theatre and as an award-winning visual artist for film and television, before eventually returning to Wellington in 2015.

Working across various mediums and styles, his practice delves into obscure art historical and cultural resources, unerringly motivated by strong environmental concerns. Cowie often depicts familiar forms and utilitarian objects and vessels as symbolic carriers of meaning, many of which have appeared in his work over several decades, developing into his own kind of iconography or visual system. At Cowie’s hand these seemingly innocuous things become new vessels, baring the load of another everyday reality; that ever-looming threat of climate change and economic collapse.

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