Antony Densham

Antony studied Fine Art at Elam, University of Auckland, earning a Post Graduate Diploma in 2011. He has been a selected finalist in the James Wallace Art Awards, the NZ Painting and Printmaking Award, the Molly Morpeth-Canaday Art Award, and in 2018 won the Merit Award at the National Small Sculpture Prize. In 2001 he won the New Zealand Art and Faith Award. He has exhibited in New Zealand, Australia, China and New York where he has representation with Kathryn Markel Fine Arts. Densham has developed a visual language that embraces the ephemeral. In Aotearoa the climate is extremely variable so in this sense, it’s not surprising that his abstractions are implied and malleable. When contemplating landscape painting in these terms the artist describes a definition of the word Vista that relates particularly well with the process of a painting as it develops. It reads... An extensive mental view (as over a stretch of time or a series of events.) ‘Slowing down, relooking, coming back to, helps to internalize a landscape and a painting practice’. These works encapsulate a palimpsest of decisions over time. The aim is to give the viewer a sense of an ever-changing psychological landscape. With respect to the relationship between abstraction and figuration Densham says, ‘The marks are both independent gestures but also acknowledge the brain's tendency to search for representation. I’m looking for this middle ground, to confound the space somehow through the interchange of revealing and concealing.'