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How to be Nowhere, Essays and texts 1971-1994, Ian Wedde

http://www.richardkilleen.com/cutouts%20killeen%20FP%20PHD/chapter%2031.pdf

http://www.richardkilleen.com/cutouts%20killeen%20FP%20PHD/cut-outs%20killeen%20chapter%2042.pdf

http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issues1to40/exhibitions10akmd2.htm

Richard Killeen (born 1946) is a significant New Zealand painter, sculptor and digital artist.

Information
Richard Killeen was educated at the Elam School of Fine Arts, where his lecturers included Colin McCahon, before graduating in 1966. He has won a number of awards, including the QE2 Arts Fellowship, and has been the subject of several major exhibitions. He is particularly famous for his arranged collections of aluminium 'cut outs' hung on walls, from 1978 onwards, and has continued arrangements of objects in this style.

Biography
Richard Killeen was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1946. His father, John Killeen, ran a signwriting business where Richard worked part-time (three days a week) until in 1981 he was able to begin work as a full-time artist. Between 1964 and 1966 Killeen completed a Diploma of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, during which he assisted his painting lecturer Colin McCahon in completing the east window of the Convent Chapel of the Sisters of Our lady of the Missions, Remuera, Auckland.

Cutouts
On September 26, 1978, Richard Killeen debuted his first cut-outs, Collection from a Japanese garden, 1937, August 1978, and                            Killeen's early cut-outs reflected his "discontent with the compression caused by the four static points of the frame," and an answer was found in their openly laid-out composition. They were created from cardboard templates, which he used to cut out of aluminium sheeting, and then lacquered and painted. The cut-outs embodied a unique collaborative effort between Killeen and the purchaser/gallery director; presented as separate items, the purchaser hangs them according to their personal tastes. As Killeen explains, "they will be given meanings in the same way that we give meaning to the reality we live in" - the relationship between the pieces changes in different contexts and times.

The imagery used in his cut-outs comes from many different sources, including both his own store of invented pictures and those gleaned from museological, zoological, and botanical texts. Francis Pound suggests that working in his fathers workshop was a formative experience in terms of Killeen's iconography. Killeen shared the lettering jobs, and perhaps more significantly, did all the pictorial and pictorial logo work - "he recalls painting such things as Golden Crumpets, horses and power tools," iconography that would inform Killeen's future practice.