Yonel Watene was born 1989 in Aotearoa, and is of Māori (Ngati Maru (Hauraki)) and Greek descent. Since 2016 Watene has created a diverse oeuvre that grew to include painting, photography, sculpture and video. His visual language, while being inherently complex, is strategically invested in modern cultures, art historic traditions and autobiographic material, all of which are important to the artist. His one 'loose' blanket rule is that he typically works in series, in either one or more mediums at a time. Each series usually focuses on a material investigation or an ideological examination, which slowly unravels as the artworks develop. This simple guideline, where he becomes absolutely fixated on one or two objectives at a time, helps create coherence and structure out of a complex visual language. His work is mainly concerned with select histories in art and culture, his whakapapa and whanau.
Watene has artwork in the Wallace Arts Trust Collection, Hocken Collection, Jan Warburton Trust, and various private collections in Aotearoa New Zealand, Spain, USA, Mexico, Australia, China and England. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Five Years, PAULNACHE, Gisborne, Aotearoa 2018; Object without Object, play_station, Wellington, Aotearoa 2018 (group); For a moment, maybe six weeks or so, no one knew how to make a painting, Wallace Gallery, Morrinsville, Aotearoa 2018 (solo); The Spirit, PAULNACHE, Gisborne, Aotearoa 2017 (solo); rugby ball, Casa Lu, Mexico City, 2017 (solo); Anything Could Happen, Yu Gallery, Shanghai, 2017 (group).
Yonel Watene is represented by PAULNACHE Gallery, Gisborne, Aotearoa.
