Euan MACLEOD’s exhibition Flux is on display, at the Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore in New Zealand until July 13 2025.
In Flux Macleod presents a series of en plain air paintings made on Haupapa Tasman Glacier, alongside studio works whose grand scale emulates their site of inspiration. Macleod’s fascination with potentially dangerous environments recurs as he paints this sublime and inhospitable world of minerals, rock and ice. His climbers, often alone or linked by a rope to a companion figure or guide are metaphors through which the connection to and reliance on another human being is amplified.
Adjoining the glacier paintings are more than 400 works from an ongoing series Macleod has made of his friend Geoff Dixon. The portraits, created almost daily over the FaceTime app, began in 2021 during Covid lockdowns as a way of maintaining a connection with Geoff, who had recently lost his partner.
Euan MacLeod was born in Christchurch in 1956. He was awarded a Diploma of Fine Arts (Painting) by the Ilam School of Fine Arts, Canterbury University, in 1979, before moving to Sydney in 1981. He has held more than fifty solo shows in New Zealand and Australia and has numerous prizes to his name including the Archibald Prize (1999).
Macleod deals mostly with landscapes and the human presence within them. The lone, anonymous figure is a common symbol in his work that embodies both the artist’s self-portrait and the ‘everyman’ or universal experience of emptiness, worthlessness and impotence. He has been described as both an expressionist and a symbolist and his dense, textured and sculptural use of paint has become a consistent feature of his work.
