Karen Sewell, Luminary I Luminare, 2022, presentation including a sculptural installation and two series of photographic prints. European Cultural Centre, Personal Structures exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Photo credit: Lorenzo Pasadonna Scarpa
KAREN SEWELL
VENICE BIENNALE | AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND TOUR 2022
Welcome to the official website of Luminary | Luminare. We’re delighted to present this exhibition to a global audience for the first time. We hope you’ll join us at one of the launch events in New Zealand or in Venice. Follow us to get updates.
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Sponsorship from
ABOUT
Luminary is a sculptural installation by artist Karen Sewell and a series of photographic prints, showing in Venice as part of the collateral projects programme of the Venice Biennale 2022. This exhibition is presented in partnership with The University of Otago and Northart Gallery Auckland. Luminary is exploring the metaphor of light and light giving bodies.
Taking Luminary to Venice – with it's sacred sites and religious historical contexts for viewing art – the project is pioneering a re-connection of a largely forgotten dialogue between contemporary art, histories of faith and sites of worship.
It is as an innovative artwork that offers the viewer or participant the potential for an experience of the unseen and unknown.
KAREN SEWELL
Artist, Aotearoa New Zealand
Karen Sewell is a visual artist working across sculpture, installation, photography, painting, sound and light. Sewell is interested in the intersection of art with spiritual experience, in particular, human experiences of the *numinous.
Sewell's unique offering artistically is through her creation of innovative artworks, in unexpected and alternative exhibition spaces, that offer the viewer the potential for an experience of the intangible. The exhibition includes the use of spherical and circular forms in sculptural and photographic works, which reflect Sewell's interest in celestial bodies and sacred geometries.
*Numinous speaks to everything within the realm of our experience which cannot be quantified, explained, or contained. Our intuition, and our feeling-states, our connection to the cosmos, and for some a sense of the divine.
CO-PRESENTERS
The University of Otago
Northart Gallery Auckland
Co-Presenter
THE UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO
DUNEDIN I ŌTEPOTI
PROFESSOR MURRAY RAE
Murray Rae trained first as an architect, then studied theology and philosophy at the University of Otago. He completed his PhD at King's College, London, on the theology of Søren Kierkegaard.
Stemming from his research interest in theology, art and architecture, Murray is interested in the sacramental quality of Luminary | Luminare and the spiritual evocations arising from the interplay of the artwork and its architectural settings. Murray's support and commitment to the project is instrumental in bringing Luminary to Venice.
Co-Presenter Gallery Representative
NORTHART GALLERY
AUCKLAND I TĀMAKI MAKAURAU
DIRECTORS JONATHAN ORGAN & JESSICA PEARLESS
Northart gallery in Northcote, Auckland, provides an accessible and community focussed programme of contemporary art exhibitions by emerging and established, local and national artists and a public programme of events, classes and artist talks.
Northart Directors, Jessica Pearless and Jonathan Organ, have supported the development of Karen’s practice and are delighted to co-present this exhibition in Venice.