Lorene Taurerewa’s large-scale figurative charcoal drawings, are distinguished for the inscrutable, monumental, still figures which occupy a middle-distance; an inaccessible space visually created by dense black fields combined with graceful lines. Her imposing large-scale works combine an intense, powerful and unyielding dramatic presence with a subtle emotional complexity creating layers of communication between drawing and viewer. In tangent, her delicate ink work captures tiny figures caught in fluid, seeping black, which visually enacts bizarre narratives in these small drawings on dura-lar. These narratives are formed intuitively, running and turning in the flowing of the ink, resulting in strange, quirky, picaresque scenes representing the fraught memories of fragmented lives. The unsettled ghosts and lost souls of her native New Zealand inhabit her figures, visually generating power, grace, loneliness and fragility who play out the narratives of Taurerewa's work.
Taurerewa spends her time in both New York and New Zealand. Taurerewa recently completed a residency at the National Art Studio of the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art. She has recently exhibited in Paris and Los Angeles at the New Zealand Consulate General Residency and will be exhibiting at the Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia in 2010. She is part of private and public collections world-wide, with recent acquisitions including the Queensland Art Gallery, Australia, and the James Wallace Arts Trust in New Zealand. Lorene was recently awarded a Creative New Zealand Arts Council Grant and is featured in the newly published Seen This Century, by NZ art critic Warwick Brown. Taurerewa is going to be a subject in an upcoming New Zealand arts documentary produced by Kirsty McDonald, the filming of which coincided with and took place at the opening of her solo exhibition, Eccentriks, in New York 2008.
