Stefan Dunlop will exhibit, for the first time in New Zealand, this month at Fishers Fine Arts Auckland gallery.

The exhibition will feature the sophisticated, graphic-pop inspired paintings and remarkable linear drawings by this exceptional artist.

Stefan Dunlop will exhibit, for the first time in New Zealand, this month at Fishers Fine Arts Auckland gallery.

The exhibition will feature the sophisticated, graphic-pop inspired paintings and remarkable linear drawings by this exceptional artist.

Join Stefan at the opening on Tuesday 21st March, 6pm, Fishers Fine Arts, 66 Parnell Road.

Born and raised in New Zealand, Stefan Dunlop now lives and works in Australia. He has studied at a number of institutions and most recently at the New York Studio School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Stefan has exhibited in London, Prague, New York, Melbourne and Sydney. He will exhibit, for the first time in New Zealand, with Fishers Fine Arts in Auckland 21st March - 4th April 2006.

Dunlop's contemporary figurative painting explores aspects of representation. While the subject matter could be anything (a still-life study, a copy of a Rembrandt, or a popular press image) Dunlop downplays the narrative element in his work. Instead he insists that it is not necessarily what he represents but how he represents it that is the key to his practice.

This interest in the action of representation has lead Dunlop to a focus on the formal aspects of painting, a reduction to line, form, colour and surface. Whilst such a focus typically draws artists into the realm of abstraction Dunlop continues to create figurative works, insisting that painting must have a subject - if not necessarily a narrative. Thus, Dunlop's works act in duality as a painting of something else and as a physical object in and of themselves, as is reiterated in the interplay between flatness and depth on the painting's surface. While the subject of the work draws in the viewer, the way in which it is represented - the physical marks on the canvas serve to emphasise the 'objectness' of the painting as an actual 'thing' in itself.

Dunlop's recent work is, in his own words, a kind of 'patchy painting'. He has begun to move away from the linear and spatial explorations of his earlier work and use large, solid blocks (or patches) of colour as a means of building space. The lack of gradual tonal modulation typical of Dunlop's work is greatly emphasised in these 'patchy paintings' as blocks of colour simply sit side by side. Negative space speaks as loudly as the positive, with the subject emerging from a passage of intensive mark-making within a broad field of colour. The immediacy and confidence of these works allow the viewer to fully appreciate the skill and power involved in every single brush-mark.