KEY POINTS:
The paintings of Glen Wolfgramm at Oedipus Rex Gallery until August 3 are spectacular combinations of dark line and vivid colour, particularly shades of red.
The movement and sweep across the canvas is expressive and energetic. Among the dark lines Polynesian motifs can be seen, often just hinted at obliquely. A complex pattern may suggest weaving, there are hints of the style of images on tapa cloth and indications of carving.
These motifs emerge obscurely from the vivid colours of the background, which evoke sunset and sunrise over the sea as well as the blood links of kinship. Across this background the black forms thrust across the surface with the force of roads, power lines, the swish of cars in the dark. Auckland is in the foreground; Polynesia is in the background.
This theme is followed with complexity and invention. It makes a spectacular exhibition that adds yet another potent flavour to the Euro-Polynesian art that has become special to Auckland.
The work of Sarah Hillary at the Anna Miles Gallery until August 4 pays homage to one of our finest painters, Rita Angus. Hillary calls her exhibition A Little because it gives us a little of the essence of Angus' work concentrated on tiny, postcard-size paintings that show the floral patterns that decorated the fabrics of Angus' time. Added to these sips of art and time are wooden buttons that also belong to the era. On each button, painted with great skill, are faces, for the most part portraits of Angus.
The decorated buttons help to give the paintings an independent existence, as do their settings on a white ground in a deep white frame. The paintings are delicate, accurate and a memorial.
Their quality lies in the exact touch of the painting manner and in the way rhymes and chimes exist between the portraits and the patterned flowers.
An example is Rita with Orange Beret, where the orange of the hat is picked up and echoed here and there in the hibiscus in the background. In another painting, a confident face is echoed by a bright, thrusting flower. Only in a couple of paintings with a red background does the delicacy falter as the red is pushed around as fill-in colour.
The small size of the paintings is exactly suited to the compact Anna Miles Gallery when it is flooded with afternoon light.
Nothing could be a bigger contrast than the exhibition at Jensen Gallery in Newmarket until the end of August, where the thunderous concrete-floored space of a converted warehouse needs big, powerful paintings to overcome it.
At present it features three painters whose work demands surrender to the experience they offer on entirely their own terms.
At one end of the big space is a painting by New Zealander Leigh Martin, which is a deep rose colour shading off to a dark edge under a surface of resin. The only response is to allow yourself to be swallowed by the depth of the colour.
The paintings by American artist Jacqueline Humphries are huge symphonies in silver-grey. The energetic swathes of paint have been allowed to drip and run in all directions.
They appear spontaneous yet controlled. The result is a created artificial landscape which is hugely impressive because of its strength and energy. You come with nothing but you leave with a strong memory.
Elizabeth Vary from Germany does much smaller work but the paintings cope with the space by pushing their abstract shapes towards the viewer.
Not far away at the Anna Bibby Gallery the viewer does need to bring some knowledge to the cool, laidback Fancy Portraits by Gavin Hurley, which runs until August 3. He takes faces, simplifies them, and makes witty icons. At the same time he plays fashionable ironic games with questions of style and technique.
The wittiest is Pirate and Pussycat, in which an 18th-century seaman, quite handsome with bristling moustaches, is matched with a cat, small and sweet with bristling whiskers.
Games are played with collage, exactly cut but used so the image looks like painting by numbers or silhouettes from the past. Yet the real image of the exhibition is not matters of technique but the faces, which are stylised, impassive stereotypes.
Paradoxically, the best of them achieve a sense of character, too. Oh Dastard is the image of an 18th-century toff, all curling hair and sideburns, but there is a hint of a theatrical, poetic personality. Hurley is not so good when he portrays women while making ironic comments on mother love where the people are horses and using the shape of the hairstyle as the principal way of suggesting time and person.
Cool, witty use of the visual effects of hairstyles, dresses and uniforms gaining tension from interplay with techniques and coarse canvases give this exhibition Hurley's special brand of piquancy.
