RESIDUE AND LIGHT
For Lang's Beach based artist Christine den Hartogh, the mediums may vary but the purpose behind her works is always clear.
Christine den Hartogh was born in the Netherlands fifteen years after World War II, the granddaughter of a Jewish man who survived the Nazi occupation. The war was never spoken of at home, and she grew up knowing almost nothing of her family history until a cousin's genealogy research revealed that over 270 members of their extended family had been killed in the Holocaust – forced onto trains bound for Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sobibor, and Bergen-Belsen.
That discovery became the foundation for Remains of the Family, Christine's contribution to Residue, a recent trio exhibition at Mangawhai Artists Gallery. Drawing on her grandfather's original Star of David badge – the star Jews were forced to wear in public from 1942 – she printed it onto small vessels, each representing a murdered person, stitched them onto a wartime-style coat and mounted them on wall panels arranged in the pattern of a cemetery where no graves were ever given. The opposite wall bore every name. The suitcase, the rough unfinished surfaces, the spiderwebs – all speak to lives cut brutally short and the long silence that followed. It is a story Christine feels compelled to tell, as tribute and as warning, at a time when far-right politics are resurgent across the world. Few who encountered it left unmoved.
Alongside this, Christine works in a sharply different register. Her colourful XXL abstract photography series Philosophy of Light – shown at Mangawhai Artists Gallery and at Art in the Park – is now on permanent display at the new Chemotherapy Infusion Unit at Dargaville Hospital. These are images made for sitting with: unhurried and open, companions for long hours of treatment. Light as something to rest in, rather than something to analyse.
The same quiet attentiveness carries through her botanical printing practice, across kimonos, vessels, journals and wall art – each piece holding the gentle imprints of nature. Between the rawness of Residue and the stillness of Philosophy of Light, what emerges is an artist with a clear sense of purpose: to make work that is genuinely present with people, wherever they find themselves.
Christine will next appear at the Art Salon at Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Temple in Auckland, and as a guest artist at MGTO Gallery in Maungaturoto mid-2027.