Giovanni Intra

Giovanni Intra (May 1968 – 17 December 2002) was an artist, writer, and art dealer who moved from his native New Zealand to the United States in 1996.

Life Intra was born in Auckland in 1968 and grew up in Tūrangi, a small town in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, and Auckland where he attended Dilworth School, a boys' boarding school. He studied at the University of Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts, completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in sculpture in 1990 and a Master of Fine Art in 1993. Curator Robert Leonard has described him as a 'precocious student': he established a reputation as a conceptual painter while still in his teens.

Intra was fascinated by Surrealist photography, such as the work of Jacques-André Boiffard, who was also a medical photographer. In his art work he investigated medicine, which he saw to have replaced religion as a source of hope for modern day society, and the frailties of the human body. His early work integrated ideas about culture text and body from non-Western sources; some of which were derived from his travels in India c. 1988. His use of text, voice and typography presages his later engagement with theory and criticism.

Intra became part of a collective of artists that established the influential Auckland artist-run space Teststrip in 1992.

In 1996 Intra was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and travelled to Los Angeles to study at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. curated by Greg Burke and Robert Leonard at the City Gallery Wellington. Three of the four Intra works from the exhibition: Nature Morte , 365 Days and Studded Suit are now in public collections. Other public gallery exhibitions include Hospitals (1995) at Manawatu Art Gallery / Te Manawa in Palmerston North and Nine Lives Auckland Art Gallery (2003) where art curator and writer Robert Leonard described Intra’s work as, "courting a peculiar beauty; scruffy, disdainful, yet marvelous." In 2024 the Dunedin Public Art Gallery mounted the exhibition Giovanni Intra: Side effects, 'examines the inner workings of Giovanni Intra (1968-2002) as he traversed the social impacts of modern medical theory upon society.'

Selected works

Untitled (Studded Suit ) 1990 view Nature Morte 1990 view An Excellent Fetish 2 1991 view 365 Days 1991 view Clinic of Phantasms 1992 view The Laughing Wall 1992 view Needle in Glove 1993 view Untitled 1995 view

Writing

Intra began writing about art for a magazine named Stamp while at art school in Auckland.

China Art Objects

In 1998 Intra and fellow art student Steve Hanson, who Intra worked with in the library at the Art Center, decided to start an artist-run gallery. China Art Objects became an influential dealer gallery, an early supporter of a number of Los Angeles artists.

Public collections

Works by Intra are held in many public art collections in New Zealand and Australia, including:

Auckland Art Gallery Christchurch Art Gallery Dunedin Public Art Gallery Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa National Gallery of Victoria