Michael Greaves is a contemporary New Zealand Painter living and working in Dunedin. 

He studied Painting and Art History and Theory at The Dunedin School of Art and Otago University in the late Nineties and early 2000’s coming back, after a stint as Head of Painting, to complete an MFA (distinction) in 2016. He now holds a position as principal lecturer in painting at the Dunedin School of Art.

His Paintings explore the complex interplay between digital and projected memory. Using traditional and experimental painting techniques, often concurrently, he sees painting as a manifestation, swerving away from the object itself, in part coming to remap itself in forming this new materialisation as a kind of new object, keying into variable associations and slippages.

“I make paintings through a process of analogy and association, drawing relations towards a new pictorial description of a collection of things, like a mis-remembering of an object of the world, in which something new is formed.”

Greaves’s painting records and archives a kind of vulnerability, both autobiographically as well as  a reflection of the constant unknowability of things. This is how he feels about the contemporary experience.

In short, he is not trying to copy the thing or the object but attempting to get a handle on how these things and objects are re-presented, like a manifold to thoughts, processes, memories and flaws of memory and its parts. To somehow arrive at a threshold moment, where the painting acts as both a signpost and a contemplation.

“I am interested in the difference between making something, and encountering something, and how these two kinds of expressions correlate and offer new ways of thinking about objects in painting.”