Opening night:
Friday 5th September, 5pm – 7pm
Ben Reid is a contemporary printmaker working out of Ōtautahi Christchurch. He was assistant to master printmaker Marian Maguire, acknowledged nationally and internationally for her own lithographs and prints as well as her collaborative printing expertise.
In 2025 Ben was the supreme winner of the New Zealand Painting and Printmaking Award with the work Sing together.
Specialising in drypoint and relief printmaking, Reid’s prints are often political, related to New Zealand’s flora, fauna and native species, the detail of various species and their vulnerability to disease and introduced predators. Reid’s practice is post-colonial, deconstructing assumed certainties about Western culture, a revisionist approach that he shares with other significant contemporary artists. Reid’s critique of the vulnerability of existing ecosystems in the 21st century are impossible to dismiss, his prints depicting the predicament of native species and their circumstances and possibilities of their resolution back at us.
