AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND.- Love Chief, a new exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery, plays with the idea of personality in art. Drawing on seminal Pop Art works from the gallery’s collection, curator Natasha Conland explores the comic tension between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

“Thirty years after artists like Andy Warhol blurred those lines, the art world continues to expand on some of the lessons of the Pop Art era,” she says.

Renowned international artists including Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein and William Wegman (USA), Martin Creed (UK), Mikala Dwyer and Louise Weaver (Australia) are featured. The title of this free exhibition is taken from a painting by the celebrated LA-based artist Ed Ruscha, who represented the United States at the last Venice Biennale. Love Chief, acquired as a result of Ruscha’s 1989 exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery, remains one of the prized assets of the gallery’s contemporary collection. Ruscha uses his advertising agency experience and love of mass media culture to make fine art. He brings the banal to centre stage, transfusing it with poetic melancholy. In the film L.A. Stories, Steve Martin's character has an urban epiphany when an illuminated highway sign speaks to him about his destiny. The irony and euphoria of his story are at one with the spirit of Love Chief.

Conland says the exhibition plays with the idea of the personality of art. “This illusive character may not be represented literally, but by the work’s intrigue and allure,” she says. “This exhibition asks how we can translate art in our own terms, in the same way we ascertain people’s personalities through our own tools of perception.” “Ultimately, you the viewer determine the character of this exhibition, in the same way you might gravitate towards a stranger you would like to get to know.”