The Persistence of Blue marks twenty years of collaboration between Matthew Couper and PAULNACHE—a relationship that has unfolded through thirteen solo exhibitions, numerous group exhibitions and art fairs, touring museum projects, and a sustained conversation about what painting can do. Since first exhibiting MythMaker in 2006, the gallery has accompanied Couper's practice through its many turns: from Wellington and Whanganui in Aotearoa / New Zealand to the Mojave Desert in the American Southwest, from intimate drawings to large canvas installations, from colonial histories to ecological anxieties. This exhibition gathers works spanning nearly three decades, from 1999 to 2026, drawn from PAULNACHE's own holdings and inventory of the artist’s work. It is both an exhibition and an archive, a portrait of a practice seen through the accumulation of time.

The title suggests less a colour than a condition. Blue is the thread running through these works, though it never settles into a single meaning. It shifts as Couper's concerns shift. In earlier paintings it belongs to the waters of encounter and colonisation, to the unstable territory of Aotearoa's historical imagination. More recently it becomes the colour of scarcity: the vanishing reservoirs of the American Southwest where the artist now lives and works. Blue is never simply descriptive. It carries memory, distance and existential notions. It is both atmosphere and warning.

Art history has long invested blue with extraordinary weight. Ultramarine, ground from Afghan lapis lazuli, once carried the prestige of gold, allowing painters such as Giotto to transform the heavens into something tangible yet unreachable. Couper inherits none of that reverence directly, but he understands blue's peculiar ability to hold contradiction: beauty and melancholy, abundance and absence, permanence and loss.

Revolution and return is one of Couper's enduring methods. Images rarely disappear; they are recycled, translated and reimagined across decades. Figures migrate from one painting to another, accumulating new meanings with each appearance. Histories behave the same way. Rather than presenting the colonial past as something fixed, Couper treats it as unfinished business, repeatedly resurfacing in the present.

Seen together, the works in The Persistence of Blue reveal an artist less interested in stylistic consistency than in sustained inquiry. Motifs recur, disappear and return. Histories fold into the present. Places echo across continents. Blue persists because the questions persist—not as answers waiting to be resolved, but as ways of seeing that continue to unfold with each new painting.

Catalogue

CAVE (ex-voto)

Links

Artist page
Artist website
Isolation Paintings – Series I
Isolation Paintings – Series II
Bone Index

Acknowledgements

Curated by: Matthew Couper & Matt Nache
Writing/text: © Matthew Couper 2026
Photography & videography: Thomas P Teutenberg
Supporting: TW Wines Gisborne & “Gizzy Gold” @ Sunshine Brewery