The Forrester Gallery welcomes four new exhibitions this Saturday (April 13), which explore the beauty in cloudscapes, architecture, human nature and the landscapes that surround us.

Ōtepoti Dunedin artists Inge and Marc Doesburg are holding their first exhibition with Ōamaru's Forrester Gallery. 

Inge is a printmaker, painter and photographer, while Marc is a photographer.

Their work explores the natural world, and in Yesterdays’ Journeys they navigate the past and present, finding beauty in the everyday.

Inge was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, and studied advertising and dressmaking before immigrating to New Zealand in 1988. In 1995 she co-founded the Inge Doesburg Gallery in Dunedin, which evolved into RDS Gallery in 2019. The great outdoors, clouds and atmosphere inspire her work, and are a recurring theme in all her artistic forms.

Inge’s art is described by David Eggleton, New Zealand’s Poet Laureate 2019-2021: 

“[T]he wild weather she depicts harks back to 19th century German Romantic landscapes. Sploshes of white or grey-blue are left to drip and animate surfaces, evoking fast-travelling fog, mist and cloud that dapples and darkens the light. 

“In the end all is atmosphere: squalls process across louring bluffs and headlands and hill crowns in a lashing, ecstatic frenzy.” (‘Weathering,’ New Zealand Listener, 19-25 August 2006, p. 48).

St Quirinus, Neuss, Germany, 2019, by Marc Doesburg.

Marc was born and lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. A photographer since his teens, Marc’s black and white images are an exposition of his view of the world, carefully composed in an attempt to create order in line, tone and visual rhythm.

The exhibition brings together a selection of photographs from places Marc has lived in and visited in his lifetime, spanning a period of almost 50 years.

In the Side Gallery, Ōamaru visual and digital artist Maggie Covell explores mental health, trauma, reproductive rights and body autonomy through her interactive art installation Good as Gold.

Informed by personal stories from women across New Zealand and Australia, Good as Gold invites the viewer to see, discuss, and connect through engaging in a meaning-making experience.

Maggie Covell, Hippocratic Corpus [la liberté des femmes!], 2024.

Port Chalmers artist and musician Robert Scott is inspired by Otago landscapes, and in his upstairs exhibition Recover the Land, Robert draws from memories, observations and imagined scenes to depict landforms – as they were, as they are, and as they once again could be.

In the upstairs Community Gallery Under Pressure features artworks guest curated by members of the community, with nga rākau (trees) from the permanent collection of the Forrester.

With our environment facing ever-increasing challenges, the gallery asked people in the community who are taking action to choose an artwork that resonated with them. 

This is a Wonderlab interactive exhibition great for kids and adults alike, to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of trees.

Yesterdays’ Journeys by Inge and Marc Doesburg, Good as Gold by Maggie Covell, and Recover the Land by Robert Scott all run from this Saturday until June 30. Under Pressure, in the Wonderlab, runs until May 19.

Robert Scott, Passing Moa Creek, 2024.