Heather Straka

Heather Straka’s work never reveals itself at first glance. Her visually arresting paintings and photographs seduce the viewer into a longer look and deeper thought. Straka delights in delivering imagery brimming with beauty, but subtle, subversive undertones. The viewer hovers between delight and discomfort. Straka is an exquisite painter, demonstrating her mastery of the brush with delicately marked details in balance with soft, smoky tonality and graduated shifts of light and dark.

Straka graduated with a BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University (1994), followed by an MFA from Ilam School of Fine Arts, Canterbury University (2000), and in 2008 was awarded the prestigious Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. With a concentration on figure studies, Straka’s subjects have complex personas and are charged with energy; providing starting points to explore topics such as androgyny, sexuality, identity and uncomfortable histories. In her series The Asian , Straka painted a portrait of a 1920s/1930s Shanghai poster girl then commissioned fifty-nine Chinese copyist artists to create their own versions of the portrait. Exhibited as a grid of sixty, the project deliberately raised questions about cultural appropriation, authenticity and mass-production.

Most recently Heather’s work has centred around finding and celebrating our hidden nature, focusing on identity, sexuality, inclusiveness, homelessness and cancel culture, through the lens of Covid-induced MIQ, in a series entitled Isolation Hotel. Her diverse cast of characters seeks sanctuary in a hotel, encouraging a meditation on their individual lives whilst also gesturing at recent global socio-political events.