Michael Armstrong

Michael Armstrong was born in Christchurch in 1954 and has regularly exhibited since 1969. He graduated from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1976. He lives in Timaru in South Canterbury and had a lengthy career as an art tutor at Aoraki Polytechnic, later Ara Institute. He was the University of Otago’s Francis Hodgkins Fellow in 1984 and received a CSA Guthrey Travel Award in 1990.

Armstrong is both painter and sculptor, and his work has a striking anarchic energy combining expressive figuration and line, and vibrant colour. This rich synthesis of formal diversity, volatile composition, and spontaneity is deeply life affirming and humanistic, and has characterised his work for the last five decades. This remains a continuous, anchoring thread throughout all phases of his ongoing exploration of form and meaning. In painting, Armstrong displays a technically fluid command of a variety of styles imbedded in a push-pull interplay of decorative surface and illusory depth. This dynamic tension segues via Frank Stella-esque shaped or rough-edged and unstretched canvases into Armstrong’s sculptural practice, evolving from late modernism in a pop palette into post-painterly abstraction.