Multiply: Reinvigorating Repetition

There is nothing new about artists using the multiple. In 1913 Marcel Duchamp used the ready-made to make his renowned Bicycle Wheel, and then duplicated it three times, heralding the idea that an artwork can be repeated. German writer Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) resonated with the great American Pop artists of the sixties and seventies. Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichenstein and many others used multiples to explore new media, mass production and consumerism, thus liberating the accessibility of art and challenging its elitist status. This motive alone was probably enough to firmly establish the multiple as a recognised device in contemporary art.

Judith Anderson has focused her life on increasing art accessibility. One laments our inability to clone multiples of her, as now retired, her role representing New Zealand artists as a dealer is sorely missed. Now residing in Hawke’s Bay and working locally as an art consultant, she has turned her hand to the curatorial task with Multiply, opening in April at Hastings City Art Gallery. Judith has attracted a high calibre of participants to continue the “multiple dialogue”.

Among those invited are established artists Elizabeth Thomson, Wayne Youle, Brett Graham, Rohan Weallans, alongside emerging stars Gregory Bennett, Ngaahina Hohaia and Tiffany Singh. Judith’s extensive network has also secured international artists Ottomar Hörl and Finn Magee.

These artists are representative of many who are re-visiting the multiple due to its association with innovative industrial or digital technologies, and subsequent notions of excess or sustainability. Others employ the collective power of object and process to convey rigorous political and cultural narratives - resonant in our current capitalist crisis.

Judith comments that her selection of these artists is due to them, “engaging in a reproductive art practice that reinvigorates repetition.”