Darcy Lange


Darcy Bruce Espie Lange was a New Zealand artist born in Urenui. Lange studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts creating hard-edge abstract sculptures before studying at the Royal College of Art in London and shifting his focus to moving image and photography.

Career

Beginning in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, Lange pioneered a social documentary practice with video, filming people in working environments such as schools, factories and farms. Among this work, Work Studies in Schools has won significant attention. Beginning in Birmingham, Lange videotaped a number of school lessons across three schools, each representing a different social class. The recordings were watched by Lange with the teachers and the students for commentary, and on occasion recorded again. Lange continued in 1977 across four Oxfordshire schools.
Lange returned to New Zealand in 1974, continuing his practice documenting working lives and, notably, Māori activism through the Maori Land Project. Working closely with photographer John Miller, Lange documented the conflict between Māori and the New Zealand government around the Ngāti Hine Block and Bastion Point land cases.
In 1979, Lange moved to the Netherlands and worked with René Coelho to produce a programme for Nederlandse Omroep Stichting based on the Maori Land Project followed by a collaboration with the University of Utrecht titled The Maori Land Struggle. He subsequently contributed to the exhibition The Land of the Maori exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in 1980.
Lange died in Auckland in 2005
In 2006, Mercedes Vicente curated the first retrospective of Lange's work at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand.

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Publications

Collections