Reece King

In 2025 Reece King was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago Otākou Whakaihu Waka.
 
With the exception of a hair-raising road trip through snowy mountain passes, King’s first 7 months in Te Waipounamu have been spent almost exclusively in his Ōtepoti studio. One of the ironies faced by a painter intent on ‘getting out of his own way’, is the need to spend almost all his time in the same spot. Watched over by a portrait of Hodgkins, with head on a quizzical tilt, King has put the hours in unfurling his wiry, voluminous output over the studio walls.
 
It would be easy to surmise that when King rests, he does so with a drawing tool in hand, but the straightforward fluency is deceptive. The vigour of these paintings is a visual consequence of incessant second-guessing. Despite impressions to the contrary, much of King’s time in Ōtepoti has been spent slowing his production down.
 
Chief model and tool in his effort to re-route his studio instincts is the tarpaulin-scale drop sheet. This catchall for inadvertent painting is also a canvas for embodied mark making. King connects the experience of working with the drop sheet to making snow angels on his winter road trip. “The best painting happens when your mind isn’t really involved at all — only your arms and legs flailing about.” The enthusiasm for the snow angel makes sense when you think about it as a mark made from behind with no help from the eye. The imprint of a solitary human in the snow also recalls the modus operandi of his large paintings of the last few years which frequently involve the unveiling of a melodramatic avatar bristling with energy.
 
King relishes the blind-spots and time-lags introduced by shifting drop sheets between studio floor and wall. “You really can’t see the work till you put it up, so you’re not constantly stepping back and over-analysing every mark.” The ebullient coloured pastel works in this exhibition result from a truncated game of ‘exquisite corpse’ in which the canvas is folded into a three-part concertina to temporarily conceal the middle section. Once uncovered, the undone centre presents the painter with a somewhat comedic opportunity to collaborate with himself. King’s studio methods conducted under the watchful eye of Frances, readily read like slapstick, but their purpose is serious.
 
The phrase, ‘presence over meaning’ reoccurs several times in the studio notebook he refers to as his ‘Cook Book’. In typically economical King prose, the phrase records his antipathy to the notion of painting as a medium for the transmission of specific and identifiable content. King is unequivocally in the camp of those interested in the ways in which the subjective life of the observer is called upon to complete the picture. King tells me, “The work should evoke answers to questions the artist has never anticipated or cannot consider. These are weird times. Painting is weird and helps people slow down and process in a unique and vital way.”
 

Reece King was born in 1989 and grew up at Te Henga on the west coast of Auckland. He completed a Masters in Painting at Unitec Te Whare Wānanga o Wairaka in 2021. He was a founder of Sanc, the ‘painter-run’ space, that ran in Tāmaki Makaurau from 2020-2023. In 2020 he was winner of the New Zealand Painting and Printmaking Award. In 2021 he received an Eden Arts Karekare House Residency and in 2023 was inaugural recipient of the Church Rd Art Initiative. His first one-person exhibition, Solosolo, was held at Anna Miles Gallery in 2021. His work was included in Auckland Art Galley Toi o Tāmaki’s Aotearoa Contemporary exhibition in 2024. King’s paintings are held in public and private collections including those of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and MTG Hawke’s Bay Tai Ahuriri. In 2025 he was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago Otākou Whakaihu Waka.