Lot 4: Seraphine Pick Untitled (Wolfman) acrylic and

Seraphine Pick Untitled (Wolfman) acrylic and graphite on board signed and dated '93 original Claybrook Gallery label affixed verso 200mm x 200mm The pillow stabbed with needles tells me this has something to do with a dream... no - a nightmare. Watching one of Picks paintings is like watching objects in the clouds - you have to look carefully and keep looking because those fragments, figments, ghosts slip in and out of the familiar - constantly unsettling what you thought was there. Hers is the kind of painting that you can't recall properly when it's not in front of you, the kind of artwork you'd describe to someone all excited, only for them to tell you later that it's not at all how you described it... you wonder if you're going mad... or if the painting's playing tricks on you... Fading in and out, Pick's compositions, like dreamscapes and nightmares inspire a reading that is more a bodily reaction to the hypothetical situations she creates than a literal sum of its parts. They represent often the half beings, the supernatural, the meta-human and what the normal call abnormal. It is what some people describe as uncanny - what is familiar but somehow bizarre - déjà vu, missing limbs, the of-this-world-but-not-of-this-world that we encounter in fictions derived from the real by literature, art and the mind in imagination and belief. Seraphine Pick is represented by Michael Lett, Auckland and Hamish McKay, Wellington. IK