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We’ve just opened our Francis Upritchard survey show, Jealous Saboteurs. In 1998, after graduating from Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch, Upritchard emigrated to London, where she would become one of New Zealand’s most successful artists. She maintains a close relationship with New Zealand, regularly returning to work and show here.

Upritchard has developed a unique sculptural language. Her works often look like artefacts and museum exhibits. They are rife with allusions to elsewheres and elsewhens. Upritchard interweaves references to archeology and anthropology, to modernism and hippiedom, to nostalgia and futurism. When she represented New Zealand in the Venice Biennale in 2009, she famously explained: ‘I want to create a visionary landscape, which refers to the hallucinatory works of the medieval painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, and simultaneously draws on the utopian rhetoric of post-1960s counterculture, high modernist futurism and the warped dreams of survivalists, millenarians, and social exiles.’

Upritchard’s works combine figurative sculptures, glass and ceramics, found objects, and furniture. She draws on a diversity of art and craft traditions, and often collaborates with artisans. Her most recent sculptures—solitary figures, on metal stands—explore ethnic and cultural types, but remain enigmatic. Are they lovers or fighters, primitives or hippies, wise ones or imbeciles? Are they from then or now—or, indeed, from nowhere and the future? Have they transcended history or has it transcended them? It is hard to know if Upritchard is poking fun at her subjects or taking them seriously. Her aims remain elusive. Ambiguity is her thing.

Jealous Saboteurs is Upritchard’s first survey exhibition. It covers twenty years of work, ranging from little-known art-school works to works produced this year. It’s a joint project with Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, curated by their Director Charlotte Day and myself. At City Gallery, it runs until 16 October 2016. And there’s a book on the way. (Here’s my essay.)