Ladybirdleaf Richard Killeen

Billowing on the outside of Toi Tauranga art gallery is a gargantuan insect, a bug-shaped silhouette with almost hieroglyphic aspects. Peering into the interface, shapes and patterns both common and unusual to the human eye begin to register... What can you see, or can you make sense of with your own brain?

With a career as an artist spanning over sixty years, Richard Killeen is a senior figure in Aotearoa contemporary art. Formally trained at Elam in the 1960s, Killeen began his art career as a painter. In 1978 he developed a landmark series of aluminium cutout works, and by the next decade had begun to use a computer to generate images, leading to a mostly digital output from the 21st century.

Using an ever-expanding library of images developed over the course of his career, Killeen often composes works in composites. He experiments with endless reconfigurations of subject matter according to geometry, frameworks and intuition. These artworks refuse taxonomical categorisation, bringing together various phenomena with free association.

Insects are not new to his practice, but are representative of a long-term fascination with the natural world. In an essay for ArtNews in 2021, Laurence Simmons’s considers the artist’s practice through the origin of the word, derived from the Latin ‘insectum’, meaning ‘to cut into’. It is interesting that the artist also ‘cuts into’ his artworks, whether it is freeing forms from grids or canvas, or creating anatomies of segments and cross-sections to populate.

Killeen’s intent is not to tell you directly what his artwork is about, nor how to feel. Rather, he sees the world in a kaleidoscope of meaning, where “each shape contains associations, of experiences that we all have” (Profiles television interview, 1983). In the same way that a small bug landing on one’s arm can provoke strong feelings of disgust or admiration, it is the complexities of layers and meanings shared across the human race – and further afield – that serves as his remit.