KEY POINTS:
As the Auckland Festival and the Art Triennial get under way, some big New Zealand guns also swing into action.
Peter Robinson has never lacked confidence and it showed in the huge sculpture in polystyrene that filled three rooms at Artspace last year.
Now, in the smaller surroundings of the Sue Crockford Gallery, he has a show of sculpture that runs until March 31. This is a bits and pieces show, again mostly in polystyrene but with contrasting tubes and bars of bright, hard metal. The best things are the pieces rather than the bits.
Some, such as Colony, are collections of small bits scattered almost at random on the floor and in danger of being trodden on. A deft little work called Protrusion comprises a soft form in polystyrene that pops out of a hard rod of aluminium. It would be better on the mantle shelf.
In other works the wall is necessary. Mimic features a little foot on the floor which takes off as a big square column of polystyrene up the wall. It has an energy lacking in other works, like Fragment and Broken Form, that poke out of the wall and play simple, dull games with the light nature of polystyrene.
Another game played throughout the show is matching a lumpy amorphous form with a precise geometric form. Host is an organic blob of plastic with a severe geometric form crossing it, and Polyglot speaks two languages eloquently. This show is lively but the work suffers from the academic freedom to do what you like. A practical commission might put backbone into this experimental dabbling.
The sculptures are accompanied by five ink and charcoal paintings, all swish and curve and demonstrations of effects. The best, Grotto, has a dark void at the centre which hints at a theme.
A similar void at the centre of some of Judy Millar's confident paintings at the Gow Langsford Gallery until March 31 is part of new departures resulting from time spent as the first McCahon Fellow. Her painting is deeper than ever, literally and metaphorically.
The works are spiky, emotional and turbulent. In the past they were reliant on moving paint in curved, gestural swoops across the canvas surface. Here, the paintings are more layered and their relation to the edge of the support is more satisfying.
The paintings are black, spontaneously dragged with rags and blades down a basic background colour. They are abstract expressionist painting but not like Jackson Pollock's. The scraping and combing of the black on to the background gives a feeling of descending rather than a progression of paint. They have an organic quality as well as a considerable decorative presence.
The strongest, Number 6, a big work on red, is a tumultuous layering of forms like a giant Fall of the Rebel Angels by Rubens, or it might equally suggest the complex waving of a bed of kelp under a sunset-red sea. What gives it its force is a sense of pressure in the movement.
The interest in these paintings is similar to early cubist work. It has an all-over effect but the real attraction lies in the way the eye moves from one different form to another in a visual exploration across the surface.
The work of W.D. Hammond called Predator Rock, at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until March 31, is not cubist nor entirely surreal nor narrative nor myth. It is uniquely his and has elements of all these things.
He takes his well-known imagery of birds as humans and humans as birds, and submerges them in a primeval stream that runs down the canvas in drips of colour. The birds have performed many functions in the past but here they are dominated by a predator based on the extinct huge New Zealand eagle. The big bird rules the others so they all become food for his power.
In Ancient Pitch, the predator grips the neck of a moa which becomes a violin. The song of our distant past is often linked to the moa but here a more complex Hammond-esque past is created. Under the presiding figure of the eagle, a human figure drags itself from the pitch, there are strange groves, smoking volcanoes and figures that hide behind trees waiting for a future.
There is melody too. The images are a symphony of place and development, so you have the extraordinary harmonious green in Eagle and Piano supporting the theme. Here, as elsewhere, are wonderful passages of painting, notably in the wings of the great birds and the shimmering atmosphere of such works as Predator Rock.
It is an exhibition of great imagination, fascinating in concept and detail. The only cavil are some little prints, crudely scratched, which show Hammond may be a superb painter but his prints have a way to go.
