PRESS RELEASE 

Hannah and Aaron Beehre at Ryan Renshaw Gallery 

Ryan Renshaw Gallery is proud to announce the upcoming exhibition featuring New Zealand based artists Hannah and Aaron Beehre. Working together for over seven years, Hannah and Aaron bring together a fine art background with a commercial design practice. They have worked across different media, often responding to specific sites to create environments and have shown in a number of galleries and festivals in New Zealand and overseas.

Hannah and Aaron Beehre collaborative artwork focuses on the imaginary, which functions as part of a fantastical screen in which we find objects of desire that are normally inaccessible to our direct experience.

Channeling the feeling of everyday magic, Hannah and Aaron’s work resists dramatic epiphanies and revelations, instead embracing the spirit of ‘presque vu’. This French term, meaning ‘almost seen’, describes the feeling of having something on the tip of your tongue, or being in the presence of something that seems familiar, but which can’t quite be grasped. For Hannah and Aaron Beehre, the resulting blend of possibility and frustration aptly describes the challenges artists face in attempting to communicate any subjective idea or experience.

The Beehres’ work therefore becomes defined by the experience of experience itself.  The objects they create are not desirable because of their intrinsic (objective) desirability, locating their work in the symbolic; the objects they create are desirable instead because they permit the subjective experience of desire in the viewer, locating their work firmly in the imaginary. 

Hannah and Aaron Beehre’s new works have the gently uplifting quality of fairytales about them. They are dreamy and otherworldly. Yet as a group, they are also graphically sci-fi in their fantasy, jewel-like in their obsessive finish, and positively geodesic in their naturalism. Rarely has high key naturalism looked so alluring!