Alan Ibell, A Ghost Got in When I Wasn't Looking

Alan Ibell is known for paintings that hover between the psychological and the phenomenological, staging spare, quietly charged environments in which figures, objects, and architectural elements act as proxies for states of mind. Across more than a decade of practice, Ibell has developed a distinctive visual language: reduced forms, restrained palettes, and carefully calibrated spaces that invite the viewer into a slow, contemplative encounter. His paintings are less descriptive than suggestive, offering scenes that feel at once familiar and slightly estranged, as though glimpsed through memory or dream.

Born in Ōtautahi Christchurch and now based in Pōneke, Wellington, Ibell has exhibited throughout Aotearoa. His work has consistently returned to questions of duality and perception: the divide between inner and outer life, the relationship between viewer and image, and the tension between what is revealed and what remains withheld. In earlier bodies of work, architectural motifs, ritual vessels, and doubled figures operated as metaphors for these concerns, situating the viewer within spaces shaped as much by psychological projection as by physical description.

A Ghost Got in When I Wasn’t Looking marks a shift within this ongoing enquiry. While Ibell’s longstanding interest in interiority remains, the new paintings move away from the tight formal reduction that has characterised much of his earlier work. In its place is a more impressionistic approach to mark-making and paint application, one that deliberately loosens control and allows intuition, chance, and accident to play a more active role in the emergence of the image.

Across the exhibition, paint is handled in varied and experimental ways: thin, heavily diluted washes sit alongside passages of dense impasto, and in several works acrylic is applied directly onto raw, unprimed canvas. These strategies introduce an element of unpredictability, inviting the surface to assert itself rather than function purely as a vehicle for representation. Where earlier works often appeared carefully resolved, these paintings remain open, provisional, and responsive to process. Accidents are not corrected but absorbed, becoming part of the works’ internal logic.

Conceptually, this formal shift reflects a broader reorientation in Ibell’s thinking. In recent years, his reduction of form had been driven by a desire to articulate an existential, “big-picture” view of existence. Yet the pursuit of the universal can risk eclipsing the personal. In response, Ibell has turned toward the everyday and the domestic as additional conduits for shared human experience. Drawing inspiration from Post-Impressionist painters, he looks to houses, interiors, and quotidian encounters with the outdoors as sites where something quietly expansive can surface.

The exhibition coincides with the birth of Ibell’s daughter, an event that has subtly but decisively reshaped both the content of the work and the conditions under which it is made. Studio time has become compressed, with much of the contemplation occurring away from the canvas. When painting does happen, decisions are made quickly and decisively, resulting in a sense of immediacy in the works. This new rhythm reinforces the exhibition’s embrace of uncertainty, positioning it as a productive force rather than a problem to be resolved.

The exhibition title is drawn from a moment witnessed on the drive to the hospital for the delivery of his daughter: two men moving house, one carrying an oversized model of a human skull through a doorway. Though the figures themselves do not appear in the final painting, the image lingers as a poetic residue—an inverted echo of birth, transition, and passage. Like many of the works in A Ghost Got in When I Wasn’t Looking, it gestures toward meaning without fixing it, allowing the personal to open outward into something shared, unstable, and quietly resonant.