Maryrose Crook: Inland Seas

11 May - 12 June 2010.

Bartley + Company Art is pleased to present Maryrose Crook’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first exhibition in the North Island for several years.

Inland Seas follows a period of travel for Crook, who returned to New Zealand in 2009, after living and exhibiting in Berlin and then in Beijing on The Red Gate Artist Residency Programme. Crook started painting seriously in the mid 1990s and quickly attracted attention, particularly in the South Island where she has a strong following.

Within a year of showing her first paintings in a Dunedin café, she had an exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Since then she has exhibited widely and won a range of residencies and awards including the 2006 Wallace Development Award. She produces sumptuous oil paintings that have been described as 'immensely enticing', 'exquisitely rendered' and 'haunting'. They have been consistently well received.

Last year Christchurch reviewer Andrew Paul Wood wrote in The Press: Crook’s inventiveness is extraordinary. Touched by the genius of Brueghel and Bosch, she invents fabulous entities for these scenes, livened with a fragile jewel like brilliance and intense colour.

You are warmly invited to meet the artist (and singer/songwriter] at the exhibition opening Tuesday 11 May from 5.30pm.

At 7.15pm Maryrose and her husband Brian Crook, who are the mainstays of the group The Renderers will give a 20minute performance of their music.

Event listed by Alison Bartley

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