Art to Talk About | New Zealand

Three artists on the lips of many in the art community this week are Nikki Huizinga (New Zealand), Salvador Dali (Spain) and Brian Keith Byrd (Georgia, USA). Each artist made a commitment to using their art to explore religious and spiritual themes. Two emerging artists are shaking up what people assume about religion today just as Dali, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work, did in the last century.


New Zealand artist Artist Nikki Huizinga wants to get people to talk. Also known as Nichola Romney, she says her art is designed to foster debate and freedom of expression in a 'conservative' artworld. She is especially interested in 'blasphemy' and is completing 14 works this month for a show designed to do just that including one with burnt pages of a bible.

A new museum dedicated to a far more well known but also controversial artist during his time has opened in Florida -- the new Salvador Dali Museum of Art in Petersburg, Florida. The collection shows that Dali wasn't always a trippy Surrealist painter. It includes works from his beginnings as a classically trained artist who painted still lifes of bread and soft landscapes of his Spanish hometown, his evolution into the world of Surrealism, and his later, religious-themed paintings.

While in Florida, you should also drive over to Fort Lauderdale to artist Byron Keith Byrd's exhibit at Ellen Charapko Gallery which challenges beliefs norms of Christianity in his second solo exhibition, Biblical Proportions.Byrd seeks the validity of its claims through works like Religious Trap, a 103 inch tall wooden cross which is seemingly plain from a distance. Upon closer inspection, it is revealed to be constructed of over 300 wooden mousetraps, a clear reference to “religious trappings.” His work provokes the viewer to untangle religious misperceptions and challenges our religious perceptions.