Dick Frizzell

Dick Frizzell’s work has always been characterised by a highly skilled handling of paint and an endlessly inventive range of subject matter and styles: faux-naive New Zealand landscapes, figurative still-life, comic book characters and witty parodies of modernist abstraction.  His taste is conveniently broad and he has a penchant for fondly remembered and well-worn clichés.  His work also portrays a sense of exuberance, ironic humour and baby-boomer nostalgia.  An anti-traditionalist, Frizzell often makes a deliberate effort to mix up the categories of high and low art - poking fun at the intellectualisation of 'high art' and the existential angst of much New Zealand painting in the art culture of his youth.