Points of Contact: Jim Allen, Len Lye, Helio Oticica

11 Dec 2010 - 27 Feb 2011

Points of Contact traces the connections between New Zealand artist Jim Allen, expatriate New Zealander Len Lye and Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, one of the most innovative Latin American artists of the twentieth century.
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Artists Jim Allen, Len Lye, Helio Oiticica

The exhibition re-assembles Allen’s seminal 1969 Small Worlds exhibition and re-stages one of Allen’s three-part performance Contact. Curated by Tyler Cann and Mercedes Vicent

In 1968-9, while head of the sculpture department at Auckland’s Elam School of Art, Allen travelled to London and New York where he respectively encountered the works of Oiticica and met the filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye. Absorbing these and other influences, Allen’s ‘environmental structures’ and performances staged upon his return, marked a radical departure within the artist’s practice, and helped open New Zealand art to new ‘post-object’ concerns with space, movement and spectators.

Along with works by Lye and Oiticica, Points of Contact reassembles for the first time the works of Allen’s seminal 1969 Small Worlds exhibition and features a re-staging of one of Allen’s most emblematic works: the 1974 three-part performance Contact, allowing a new generation to experience a major performance piece in New Zealand art.