Richard Killeen Punctuation Space

Richard Killeen is quite possibly New Zealand’s most important postmodernist artist. Since the 1960s, he has produced an exceptional body of work that has challenged notions of formalist painting. His work frequently explores language and syntax alongside diverse visual material. While he has produced work in many formats, Killeen is best known for his ‘cut-outs’. These are composite artworks that can be endlessly rearranged, upending conventions of composition.

Killeen’s cut-outs typically involve numerous pieces of aluminium, sometimes cut into intricate shapes. These components are painted with a wide range of imagery — flora and fauna, tools, buildings, abstract motifs and so on. Once assembled, the resulting works are often colourful and complex, and open to interpretation. The website of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki includes the following statement about Killeen’s cut-outs: “Through fragmented imagery, Richard Killeen’s cut-outs investigate how we make meaning and construct our own sense of place. Tea cups, flora and fauna, planes and colour fields come together as small universes around which we might orbit. From dreamscapes to landscapes, these snapshots connote a connectedness between things real and imagined.”

Punctuation Space is a 2002 artwork comprised of 36 octagonal cut-out pieces. Each is painted with punctuation symbols commonly used in writing — question marks, parentheses, semicolons and full stops, among others. These elements suggest a playful examination of written language and syntax — an intriguing parallel to Killeen’s wry undermining of the syntax of painting in his cut-outs.

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