(click on the above image to see an enlarged version)

Crown Lynn New Zealand - The Show A Rudolf Boelee exhibition in collaboration with Brian Shields and Craig Stapley 1996-97 High Street Project Gallery, Christchurch City Gallery, Wellington Since the 1980's Robyne Voyce and Rudolf Boelee became interested in collecting  ceramics from the immediate postwar period. This interest led in 1993 to the acquisition of the Crown Lynn New Zealand name, which was the former trade mark of Crown Lynn Potteries Limited. Once known as the "crowning" glory of the ceramic industry in New Zealand, offering a touch of elegance and perfection in a range of your choice, until it became yet another casualty of the deregulated nature of industry in New Zealand. In 1996 the project "Crown Lynn New Zealand, A Salvage Operation", a Rudolf Boelee collaboration with graphic designers Brian Shields and Craig Stapley, was exhibited at the High Street Project Gallery, Christchurch and City Gallery, Wellington. Crown Lynn New Zealand was a breakdown of distinction pop culture and "serious" culture, different genres and different art forms and also investigated some of the ideas of 'De Stijl', a constructivist group of Dutch artists active in the early part of the 20th century. Christchurch Nik Wright LOG Illustrated Summer 1999 The other real great buzz I've got recently was seeing the Rudolf Boelee retrospective at CoCA. His stuff looks so damn good especially when he collaborates with Brian Shields and Craig Stapley. This trio does modernist design by numbers, but they do it so well you know they're not just piss-taking clones, but real design classics of earlier eras that are only now being brought to the fore as part of some retro resurgence. Perhaps the best example of the subtlety of their illusion is the beautiful DIOR fashion advert from the 1996 Crown Lynn series "Watch out for world's behind you". It could have easily come direct from the pages of Harper's October 1956.