Tony de Lautour is a painter whose practice is characterised by a willingness to engage with culture in its entirety, integrating disparate imagery and ideas in work that is insightful and often provocative. He draws thematic and iconographical inspiration from such diverse sources as prison tattoos, corporate catalogues and post-quake rezoning maps. It is a unique visual language that seeks to illuminate the social and political realities of our time: the codes and contradictions, fears and follies that comprise an identity or a society. De Lautour organises this visual vocabulary in accordance with an eclectic and evolving array of ideological and aesthetic preoccupations. He seems equally comfortable with modernist abstraction, naive style landscapes and crude drawings, the latter not dissimilar to what you find in a bathroom at a student bar, albeit loaded with political and social critique. His approach to painting is distinctively contemporary in its dynamic, multifaceted nature. It evidences a fondness for paradox and the jolt of juxtaposition; it is schizophrenic and transgressive - boundary pushing in its casual disregard for traditionally accepted means and methods of expression. De Lautour is at ease with dichotomy, frequently traversing the space between irony and sincerity, confusion and clarity, harmony and chaos and he mines these polarities for meaning, vexing viewers into different, often conflicted, understandings of the subject in question. It would be a mistake, however, to regard de Lautour as a mere provocateur - his work is as notable for its sensitivity and curiosity as for it’s sometimes savage wit and capacity for disorientation. It is these qualities in combination that earned him recognition as a New Zealand Arts Laureate and a place alongside his exceptional peers Shane Cotton, Peter Robinson, Séraphine Pick and Saskia Leek, all of whom came out of the Canterbury School of Arts within a few years of his own graduation in 1988. De Lautour himself held his first solo show in 1991 and won the Visa Gold Art Award in 1995, establishing himself as one of our foremost creatives early in his career. As his practice has developed over the past two decades, he has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and Australia. Solo exhibitions of his work have been shown at City Gallery Wellington, Te Manawa, Waikato Museum of Art and History. His work has been included in many significant curated exhibitions in New Zealand and Australian public galleries, including ‘Close Quarters‘ (1995), ‘Hangover‘ (1995-6), ‘Now Showing‘ (1996-7), ‘Bright Paradise: First Auckland Triennial‘ (2000); and ‘Prospect 2001: New Art New Zealand‘ (2001). His works have been acquired for major public and private collections, including Auckland Art Gallery, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, National Gallery of Australia, Chartwell Collection, National Library of New Zealand, and the Christchurch Art Gallery.