Bronze god: Definitive book on famed NZ sculptor is released

Cornish-born sculptor Terry Stringer ONZM, still making formidable work at 80, is a long-established figure in New Zealand art, known mainly for his bronzes, which blend Renaissance humanism, contemporary stylisation and optical puzzles. As Ovid says in the first line of the Metamorphoses, “My spirit moves to speak of
bodies changed into new forms.” Stringer is justly celebrated for his public art such as The Risen Christ in Christchurch and The World Grasped in Auckland, his smaller works near ubiquitous in the private gardens of the well-heeled, and as founder of the now closed Zealandia Sculpture Garden at his former home near Puhoi north of Auckland.

Art historian Linda Tyler has edited this new survey of the artist with contributions from celebrated art historians and Stringer himself, all beautifully photographed by Haru Sameshima and Jane Ussher. It’s a great achievement ‒ a no-brainer purchase as a reference text for anyone serious about New Zealand art, and a beautiful objet de virtu in its own right that anyone can appreciate.

The book does a masterful job of positioning Stringer and fleshing out his milieu: early life on Waiheke Island, art school, peers such as Richard Killeen, Robin White and Ian Scott, and his life partner, musician Tim McWhannell. Stringer trained at Elam, completing a diploma with honours in 1967 – the influence of Greer Twiss evident in Stringer’s Mountain Fountain (1981), which has a relational vibe to Twiss’s Karangahape Rocks (1969). In the years that followed, Stringer won nearly every award worth mentioning and four Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council scholarships.

Terry Stringer at work on a sculpture depicting the artist Jacqueline Fahey. Photo / Jane Ussher

Tyler brings unique insights into how the young Stringer’s burgeoning sexuality led the artist to figural classicism, gazing at statues in the Auckland Art Gallery in an echo of the long-established route of the homoerotic gaze set forth by Johann Winckelmann two centuries earlier: “For Terry Stringer they were coming to mean something else. As he negotiated his own desiring gaze and its role in the shaping of his identity, he was attracted to images of the male body in athletic action, including depictions of biblical stories such as Cain slaying Abel.”

Tyler’s discussion of the stage set-like installation room works of the early 1980s leads naturally to architecture and design expert Andrew Douglas’s fascinating chapter on Stringer’s architectural collaborations. Art historian Peter Simpson teases out the significance of profiles and temple forms in Stringer’s work.

And yet his true historical genealogy remains insufficiently explored. There are lightning flashes of it when Tyler compares the sculptor’s anamorphism to Parmigiano’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524), notes his Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (2022) borrows its title from Bronzino’s c1545 painting in London’s National Gallery, and refers to the tricksy portraits by Giuseppe Arcimboldo assembled from fruit and other things.

Magical distortions, clockwise from left: Mother and Child and Three Instruments of the Passion, 2001; Art, Truth and Beauty, 2020; and Portrait of Francis Bacon, 2012. Photos / Haru Sameshima

Stringer’s spiritual home is Italian Mannerism, the deliberately tense, self-conscious style that emerged after the High Renaissance, when certain artists began to distort the classical ideals perfected by Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. They rejected harmony and balance for elongated bodies, acidic colour, unstable space and a kind of elegant artificiality, style pour style, both refined and deliberately affected. It is art made with awareness that perfection has already been achieved, so the only honest move is to distort or complicate it or, with a nod to the theorist Viktor Shklovsky, make it strange.

The art historian Achille Bonito Oliva argued that Mannerism was a modernising moment, the distortions a kind of self-protection against a world grown cold and reactionary in which inherited political, religious and epistemic certainties were no longer secure.

Art made with awareness of what’s gone before, clockwise from left: Face Figure Fingers Landscape, 2011; Gather Ye Rosebuds, 2001; and The Nature of Poetry, 2006. Photos / Haru Sameshima

For Bonito Oliva, Mannerism was meant to be decoded and admired for its difficulty; it privileges invention, elegance and the artist’s individual signature over classical universality, or in the case of Aotearoa, over recycling the conventions of 20th-century formalism, the “Picasso and Moore” of his art school days. Stringer wants a better, more enchanted and mysterious world for us.

Stringer’s is also a profoundly postmodern moment. The architectural critic Charles Jencks saw postmodernism as a critical reanimation of classicism, reviving classical forms as a flexible semiotic double coding. Stringer’s sculptures simultaneously communicate with the public through the familiarity of the classical, and play to the intellectual through irony, quotation and theoretical play. His is a restoration of symbolism, meaning and jouissance after decades of minimalist austerity.

I have a few minor cavils about the book’s design. The swathe of uncaptioned photographs before you get anywhere near an introduction, and the floating of chapter titles below the opening paragraph, feels more like a glossy magazine layout than a serious book. The photographs could have been edited better, too, as some feel repetitive or padded. All in all, though, it’s a brilliant contribution to our national art discourse.

STRINGER: The Art of Terry Stringer, edited by Linda Tyler, photographs by Haru Sameshima & Jane Ussher (Massey University Press, $90 hb), is out now. Image / SuppliedSave

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