During 1993 Peter Gibson Smith was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow. While on this residency he completed two series of work: Transfiguration; History of the Analytical Machine exhibited at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and The Spanish Riding School shown at Gregory Flint Gallery in Auckland.
Beyond the wildest dreams of Gutenburg, electrical tools have provided for the dissemination of information and of images. The classical art object and the Coca-Cola advertisement coalesce, the Mona Lisa is now laminated to ashtrays, surrealist art the inspiration for computer ‘screen savers’, in short, our Western art culture has plugged itself into the machine.
Gibson Smith’s works in this series span sources covering 2000 years. In Levade - Airs Above the Ground, the central figures of the nude and horse are from the Hellenistic work Amazon on a Dying Horse - a sculpture estimated to be from the second or third century BC, whose form reappeared in the sketchbooks of fifteenth and sixteenth century artists.
Ephemera
→ Peter Gibson-Smith: Amazon on a Dying Horse, 1995, exhibition card