For the past thirty years Séraphine Pick has engaged with figments of memory and explored the body as a site of consciousness in her painting practice. Most recently, she has looked to digital information technologies to decode aspects of universal human experience. Over time her works have evolved from dark and rich tableaus to more expansive works with sinuous lines, pointillist technique and a bright, acidulated palette.

Séraphine’s work has been the subject of two major survey exhibitions: White Noise, the Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt (2015) and Tell Me More, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (2009). Recent exhibitions include: Rider Instinct, Te Uru Waitakere, Auckland (2024), Pages of Mercury: Rita Angus, Andrew Beck, Séraphine Pick, City Gallery Wellington (2022) and Coloured Mud with Jaime Jenkins, Michael Lett (2021). Significant solo exhibitions include Looking like someone else, Pataka Museum, Porirua (2014) and Tell Me More, City Gallery, Wellington (2010). Works by Pick were included in the 1st Auckland Triennial in 2001. In 1999 Pick was a Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin and in 1995 she held the Rita Angus Cottage Residency in Wellington. The Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation Art Award was awarded to her in 1994. Pick graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury in 1987 and gained a Diploma of Teaching from Christchurch College of Education in 1991.

Panel Statement: “Part of a significant group of Ilam School of Fine Arts graduates in the 1990s, Séraphine Pick’s atmospheric and imaginative works have made her one of our most recognisable painters, and an inspiration for several generations of art students. Her layered and fluid figuration shifts between exterior and internal selves, often with special focus on female experience. Her practice is broad, encompassing large-scale tableaux and off-kilter portraits to radiant explorations of colour and light. She has sustained a committed, continually renewed artistic practice across more than 30 years, and is represented in all our major public collections. Pick received the Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation Art Award (1994) and the Rita Angus Cottage Residency (1995) and was Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 1999.” – Laureate Selection Panel. 

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