Opening 11th July - Solo

Peter Lambert
11th July - 2nd August
Peter Lambert offers a playful yet deeply reflective look at how everyday objects can embody human experience. Known for his distinctive dribbly paint technique, Lambert’s newest series turns wine glasses and bulls into striking allegories of connection, strength, and cultural identity.

In Solo, Taranaki artist Peter Lambert offers a playful yet deeply reflective look at how everyday objects can embody human experience. Known for his distinctive dribbly paint technique, Lambert’s newest series turns wine glasses and bulls into striking allegories of connection, strength, and cultural identity.

Lambert’s wine glass paintings are immediate in their charm: single glasses, pairs, and groups rendered in sweeping, spontaneous lines that evoke moments of solitude, celebration, and emotional intimacy. Each glass carries its own character; a bold red, a blushing rosé, or a sparkling champagne. Together, they form a cast of personas, portraits of people as vessels, leaning on one another, full of spirit, or left half empty. There is humour here, but also tenderness and truth.

This spirit of anthropomorphism continues in a powerful new set of allegorical paintings inspired by Lambert’s long time fondness for Sangre de Toro, a Spanish red wine. Each bottle comes with a small plastic bull attached, and over time Lambert noticed that every bull stood in a slightly different stance; defiant, poised, confrontational, or proud. This quiet observation became the seed for a series exploring strength and masculine identity. In Bulls Sparring, four bulls pose, each its own archetype. In Sangre de Toro, two bulls clash, horns locked, blood spilled, an unmistakable nod to today’s global political tensions, a world increasingly shaped by aggression and ego.

A quieter yet profoundly symbolic work, This Way Up, focuses on Aotearoa/New Zealand itself. Lambert has painted the country but flipped it upside down. The composition draws on a memory from his teenage years working the pea harvest in Hastings, where a Maori student who attended Te Aute College once said, “I’m going up to Dunedin.” The phrase stuck with Lambert, disrupting the North is up, South is down orientation inherited from colonial map making. In many traditional Māori worldviews, Aotearoa is often seen from a different perspective, sometimes shown upside down with South as the top. By titling this work This Way Up and placing the country on its head, Lambert questions long held geographic hierarchies and gestures toward indigenous perspectives at a time when New Zealand is once again grappling with its identity and direction.

Together, the works in Solo are witty, warm, and deeply considered. Whether through a tilted glass, a charging bull, or an inverted island, Lambert invites us to reflect on how we see ourselves, each other, and the place we call home.

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