Julian Dashper (1960-2009) is regarded as one of New Zealand’s most well-known and highly respected contemporary artists. Exploring modernism in a New Zealand context, his work is about the connections between abstract art and popular culture.

Dashper’s work focussed on art histories and ideas and were always in active dialogue with other artists. He explored contemporary art idioms—the challenges posed by international art styles of abstraction, post-object art and neo-expressionism - as well as mainstream New Zealand painting. He then scrambled them up, making works full of perverse art in-jokes, and riffing on other artists’ works. In New Zealand, Dashper represents a transitional figure between the inward-looking, nationalist, medium-based art that preceded him and the globe-trotting, post-national, idea-based art that followed.

This work signals Dashper’s long-standing interest in the work of American minimalist artist Donald Judd.

Julian Dashper graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1982. In 2001 Dashper was awarded a senior Fullbright fellowship and was the artist-in-residence at the Donald Judd Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Dashper exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and through Europe, America and Australia. His work has been the subject of major New Zealand retrospectives including the show Julian Dashper & Friends, at City Gallery Wellington in 2015. Dashper is represented in all major public collections in New Zealand, as well as in Australia, Germany, the US, and The Netherlands.