Barry Cleavin

Etchings, aquatints & lithographs

Barry Cleavin’s etching/aquatints as always show a finely honed sense of humour and the bizarre, and a love of wordplay, laid over more serious perspectives on human frailties, absurdities and our place in the world. “How many shags can you have on the head of a pin?” he asks. His answer is literal but entertaining. Double meanings, sometimes triple, abound. Line dancers set out for encounters with shags, typography melds into topography, always thought-provoking and very meticulously created. The Typography-Topography series is linked to the European explorers’ definition of Banks Peninsula in early drawings. His Life Cycles series of lithographs, created with the PaperGraphica Studio, features tiny men on bicycles in a watery world. It explores ideas of past and future generations, of letting offspring choose their own course, or individual ‘pursuits’ (pun intended).

Internationally recognised as a master of the printmaking craft, Barry Cleavin uses the labour-intensive age-old techniques to produce artworks of extraordinary precision – and incisiveness. He has participated by invitation in numerous biennales and exhibitions of printmaking around the world, as well as solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Although he is one of NZ’s most collectible printmakers, his work remains very affordable at only $600-900 – in the true spirit of printmaking which evolved around five centuries ago to bring art and ideas to a broader audience. (More background below).

Recent Work 

Cyber-Haiku Cleavin extends the wordplay into a playful suite of ‘Cyber-haiku’. He found a Japanese computer program which writes haiku poetry in English which is nonsensical while being grammatically perfect. Cleavin has morphed his own etchings using computer technology to illustrate these bizarre cyber-poems and (almost) make sense of the nonsense. These limited edition (20) inkjet prints sell for $200 each unframed; and $1500 for a framed set of all 9, or a boxed folio printed on Japanese handmade mulberry paper. Barry Cleavin’s inkjet prints have attracted excellent critique here and in Australia. Please contact us for more details and images of the Cyber-haiku series.

Paintings by Barry Cleavin More serious are a series of paintings from Cleavin’s Muybridge series, exploring ideas about evolution. Cleavin (who majored in painting, graduating with honours from Ilam early in his career) is renowned internationally for his superb and painstaking printmaking and has seldom offered paintings for exhibition. This series has attracted great interest from both critics and collectors, and are a very good investment at just $2500.

More About the Artist 

Barry Cleavin is regarded as New Zealand’s most important and influential printmaker, and he has received critical acclaim within New Zealand and internationally. Art critic Pat Unger noted: “Unlike Duchamp who explored a private experience in riddles, chances and anti-art objects, Cleavin communicates more widely; he exposes the follies, the vices and the ‘boutique fripperies’ of art and of contemporary life with easily available and elegant imagery.”

Born – Dunedin, New Zealand, 1939. 1963-66: Studied at Ilam School of Fine Art, University of Canterbury. Majored in painting, graduated with Honours.

1967 & 1972: Awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Scholarship

1972: Studied at the Honolulu Academy of Fine Art, awarded the Hawaii Print Award.

1975: Artist in Residence, Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education, Victoria, Australia.

1978-1990: Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts

1983: Received Fulbright Fellowship to work and study at the Tamarind Institute, University of New Mexico.

1990s: Artist in Residence at various institutions around New Zealand.

2001: Awarded The New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM)

2005: Awarded Degree of Doctorate of Letters, University of Canterbury.

Exhibitions: Barry Cleavin has exhibited widely in New Zealand since 1966, including major surveys of his work curated by leading public art galleries in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. In Australia, large solo exhibitions have been presented at the GIAE in Victoria and the University of Tasmania School of Art.

In 1998 two exhibitions were staged in Japan, in the Sapporo Museum of Modern Art, where he was guest speaker and exhibitor, and in Hokkaido. He also exhibited in Oregon, USA, in 2003.

International Group Exhibitions include Print Biennales and Triennales in more than 20 cities throughout Europe, in the Middle East, Asia, the USA and South America.

His work is documented in numerous publications and art journals in New Zealand and overseas, including the international Allgemeines Kunstlerlexikon Art Dictionary.

Barry Cleavin lives and works in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Please contact us to confirm current prices: most prices are posted at the time of exhibition, and may be revised as the artists’ values increase.