Barry Cleavin Fine Arts exhibition now open

Mitigating Factors and the Oncology Suites

Barry Cleavin

ILAM CAMPUS GALLERY, BLOCK 2, SOFA, 21 AUGUST – 25 SEPTEMBER 2020

* There won’t be an official opening for this exhibition but the gallery will be open as usual, 9am-4pm Monday–Friday, we look forward to seeing you.

‘Mitigating Factors’ and ‘The Oncology Suites’ provided a title for a sequence of verbal and visual notations that Cleavin associates ‘with being me’. For this exhibition he welded past and present graphic facts and fictions that may indicate something of his approach to attaining 80 years of age. In all, the exhibition is a synopsis of a life lived between 1939 and 2020.

Born in Dunedin in 1939, Barry Cleavin received an Honours in Painting from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in 1966 and in 1972 won an Arts Council scholarship to study with Gabor Peterdi (Professor of Printmaking at Yale University) and James Koga (Master Printer at the Honolulu Academy of Arts).

He was senior lecturer in Printmaking at Ilam School of Fine Arts from 1978–1990, held various artist in residence positions between 1972–1982 and in 1983 won a Fulbright fellowship to work at the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico.

Barry Cleavin was awarded the ONZM in 2000 and an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Canterbury in 2005.  He currently lives and works from ‘The Boojum Press’, Portobello, Dunedin.

Image credit:  Looking towards the Taiaroa Heads, 2020, injet print (as part of Ilam Editions with thanks to Trevor Hall)