Glen Wolfgramm

Born in Auckland in 1971, Glen Wolfgramm is of Tongan and Irish descent. A self-taught artist, he lives and works in West Auckland and has been exhibiting since 1998.

Wolfgramm considers himself "an ordinary Kiwi" within a changing New Zealand ethnographic landscape, where the Pacific is not only where we 'are' but increasingly where we are 'from'. For Wolfgramm, paintings are narratives of migration, beginning as the brush first darkens the canvas and unfolding their stories until they are told. Though it references both Celtic and Polynesian motifs, his work is primarily concerned with giving expression to contemporary cultural experience. The inky hooks and laddered frameworks that form the architecture of his glossy surfaces are, as he puts it, "a personally evolving set of marks - migratory birds themselves - which have had their separate beginnings in Belfast and Va'vau and their weavings and joinings, their nest building, their home, their children, in West Auckland."