Cat Fooks

‘Paper, Rock, Scissors’

2021

oil and mixed media on canvas

490mm (H) x 600mm

purchased from Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland for $5000 in March, 2021.

Buying group: Chris Druce, Barbara Melchior, Lynne Walker.

Cat Fooks:

born Hamilton, New Zealand, 1976.

Cat Fooks was born in Hamilton in 1976 and completed a Bachelor of Visual Communications, majoring in painting, at Unitec, in 1999. Seventeen years later, her first solo exhibition, Pleasant St, was held at Anna Miles Gallery. Summoning effrontery and guts on a regular basis is not straightforward. Cat Fooks’ time in the studio is about ‘courting the out-of-control’. Early on she tuned into reconstitution as a means of searching, repeatedly pillaging, cropping and reapplying elements of her previous output and incorporating studio accoutrements such as frames, stretcher wedges and paintbrushes. Somehow, in a ballroom-scale basement in Onehunga, Fooks’ paintings acquire audacity during an arduous mode of production.