KEY POINTS:
This is a week of big paintings in splendid isolation on the wide walls of galleries. The most extreme example is at the Sue Crockford Gallery where, until June 20, two big paintings by Billy Apple face each other across an expanse of white room - although they are not by Apple inasmuch as he designed and commissioned them and a signwriter painted them.
They emphasise that 45 years after he adopted the name Apple the artist has become a brand. The paintings, in bold black and white, are accompanied by a little TM, a registered trademark. This is self-esteem made both monumental and commercial.
What they evoke are the artist's reputation, his history, his presence, his retrospective exhibitions and his status as the country's leading conceptual artist.
The concept is evoked by a big black apple on a white ground with "Billy" lettered across it, and by a black rectangular painting with BILLY APPLE in capitals.
Plain backgrounds are the order of the day for two characteristically large paintings by Liz Maw that dominate the space at Ivan Anthony until June 23. Viewers will first come across a painting of The Young David Attenborough, immaculately suited, hair tidily parted, perpetually smiling and grasping a large vividly coloured snake which coils itself around his leg.
In his left hand, Attenborough holds the snake gently behind the head while his right hand makes a teacher-like gesture to we poor ignorant people looking on.
The snake is extraordinarily phallic and its tongue flickers and looks like the fuse on a timebomb. Here is a tidy and masculine instructor tempted, as was Eve, by the wild and glittering forces of nature. And glitter the snake does. Its scaly length is characterised by pinging highlights that make the whole ensemble in its black frame an extraordinarily ironic icon.
The highly individual style of this work is matched by The Naiad, which is a genie in a pump water bottle.
This special genie is a mermaid with splendid breasts, caught in the bottle in all the seductive glitter of her scaly tail that terminates with delicate feathery gills.
Bubbles rise from the tail and the mermaiden has a halo of singing birds and a very individual face.
This is Maw at her highly individual and imaginative best. Where dark backgrounds serve her much better than the sunlit glade, scrawled note and mask of Tutankhamen that adorn Dirty Harry.
This curious title is completely outdone by the title of one of the small works on display which features a Madonna and child and a blue moon and is called, delightfully, crying faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.
The Jensen Gallery, which has moved to Newmarket, is a huge area and only strong, bold painting will work in the cavernous space. Here, Steven Bambury is showing his familiar geometric abstractions.
There is a sort of ironic twist to the title of this show. It is called For the People of Auckland City, but since the painting is extreme abstraction it is unlikely that there will be a mass reaction of gratitude.
Yet it is worth seeing if only for the artist's control over materials. One of the works, Ghost, (Opus LXIV), is a ladder of seven simple forms done in silver leaf on aluminium that has been treated with chemicals to give delicate variations in colour, notably a shimmer of yellow.
The work begins right on the floor and this grounding is necessary to its structure because its combination of delicacy and strength needs a base.
en his smaller paintings have considerable carrying power and are suited to a bold architectural setting.
Softer, more domestic but more complex are the more elaborate geometrical abstractions painted on canvas by Roy Good at the Artis Gallery in Parnell until June 24.
They are singularly delicate and harmonious. There are light colours in the centre of these intricate combinations of rectangles and squares while darker colour gives weight to the edges.The colours throughout are carefully matched, sometimes surprising, but always calm and serene.
The consistent quality of these thoughtful paintings show Good as one of the largely unrecognised masters of abstract painting in New Zealand.
Out at the Remuera Gallery until June 8 is the work of another veteran New Zealand painter with his own special style, John Nicol. He paints the mystery of flowers unfolding in a curved tripartite form with a potent sense of atmosphere that tellingly combines colour, shape and form.
