Solo

Peter Lambert
July 2025
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 signature dribbly paint style echoes the unpredictability of graffiti and the controlled freedom of screen-print editions.

About the Exhibition

Solo

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.

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About the Artist

Peter Lambert

Born in Hawera in 1945, Peter Lambert has navigated a unique path where mathematics, broadcasting, and visual art intertwine. After completing a BSc in Pure Mathematics from Canterbury University in 1968, he entered a career in television, rising to the role of Studio Director at TVNZ (formerly NZBC), while never letting go of his drawing habit.

Throughout the early 1970s, Lambert travelled extensively. His adventures included hitchhiking across Europe and stays in the UK, US, and Canada . On his return to New Zealand, he resumed broadcasting, notably directing Country Calendar, before settling back in Taranaki. From the 1980s onward, he shifted to becoming a full‑time painter and print‑maker, establishing his studio in Okato. Lambert’s work consistently balances structure and spontaneity. Whether through quick-line portraits sketched in public spaces or his dynamic plein-air landscapes of coastal Taranaki, he captures movement, character, and atmosphere. His 1994 summer school in solar-plate etching at Long Island University introduced new techniques that further enriched his visual vocabulary.

Lambert’s signature dribbly paint style echoes the unpredictability of graffiti and the controlled freedom of screen-print editions. His figures move with authenticity and immediacy, and his Taranaki landscapes, caught in shifting light and weather, reveal a deep connection to place.

Over more than four decades, Lambert has exhibited widely, collaborated with young street artists, and produced numerous prints and originals. His work continually explores portraiture, narrative, and cultural identity, offering both wit and insight, whether painted, etched, or drawn.