KEY POINTS:
Two shows exemplify the year. Artspace in Karangahape Rd is showing nearly 300 drawings from everywhere in the country, all on A4 paper and all mounted at the same height on the wall, making a frieze that extends through the three rooms of the gallery.
This is the second National Drawing Award. Half the entrants are on show at Artspace and the rest are in Christchurch. Just before Christmas they will swap.
The show is emblematic of this year's art, a huge production of images in an enormous variety of styles, from the gestural dash to the finely detailed and precise.
At Ferner Gallery in Parnell is a crowded show of drawings and paintings, mostly by great names from the European past. Much of it is small work, the edge of the huge lake of the European art industry lapping at our distant shore. It has a scholarly catalogue by Christopher Johnstone.
The National Drawing Award is democratic. Everyone can have a go. Some of the drawings show a high degree of skill, others are raw, secondary-school exam stuff. Even a couple of children's drawings have been sneaked in, perhaps in the vain hope that they will be chosen by the judge and there will be a scandal which reveals the absurdities of modern art.
That sort of stuff is 50 years out of date. There is a high level of knowledge and experience at every level of art in Auckland.
The sheer copiousness of this show is paralleled by the startling number of galleries in Auckland. The art of the art schools, the public galleries, and the awards have frequently been strenuously conceptual. A great deal of the serious art is installational, which is largely unsaleable.
The Auckland Art Gallery, embroiled in fundraising for its extensions, has not had quite the central place it has in past years. Nevertheless, it managed to stage from its own resources a fine exhibition of etching called Masters of Bitten Line and a splendid choice of paintings from its McCahon collections, supplemented by a show of his Titirangi paintings at Lopdell House.
The gallery's history and its collections were commemorated stunningly by John Reynolds' hall of silver lettering in the 54321 show.
The biggest exhibition was The Art of the 60s, which seemed a little tired. What had been shocking half a century ago now seems safely tucked up in bed with art history.
At the New Gallery, the contemplative exhibition by Wolfgang Laib - which used masses of soft, yellow, sweet-scented pollen - lingers in the memory.
The Walters Prize Show, which might have been controversial, passed almost without notice.
The best things that came to us from overseas in the dealer galleries were works from our own Jacqueline Fraser, whose stylish show was satire on being stylish, and Tony Oursler, whose speaking heads, created using projection, spoke movingly of the nature of suffering and isolation.
From the mass of art offered at the galleries, much of it interesting, some names emerged leading the charge.
Rohan Wealleans, with his layered paint and his excavating, cutting and slashing, had two exhibitions and carried off the valuable Wallace Award with a big torso-like object swinging from a gallows.
The Wallace Award produced a lively exhibition of finalists, and the works sat well in the Aotea Centre and the Wallace Gallery.
Also at the cutting edge was the work of Sara Hughes, whose vivid, angular explosions launched themselves across the walls of the Gow Langsford Gallery and provided a visual counterpart for the millions of electronic messages constantly flashing around the world.
An established artist who maintained his reputation was Paul Dibble, whose skill in casting bronze gave strength to his huge sculptures, which seemed to sum up Pacific life and history in their powerful curves.
Another was Peter Robinson, finalist in the Walters Award, who filled Artspace with a great, romping, comic sculpture in polystyrene.
For the rest there was masses of good work of a standard astonishing for a city the size of Auckland. A few artists grappled with themes on a deeper level, notably Seraphine Pick and Richard Lewer.
The year saw the death of Trevor Moffit, an artist underrated here, who in his strong, rough, forceful way made memorable images from New Zealand legend and history.
There were some surprises. Tom Mutch - bard of Taranaki and the Coromandel - went his highly individual way by staging a show of painting and sculpture in a studio in Karangahape Rd.
Alice Blackley wove word-spells at the Bath Street Gallery in her unobtrusive way, and Jonathan Campbell created an unexpectedly stunning exhibition by casting kettles and teapots and power cords in bronze at Oedipus Rex Gallery.
Throughout the year hundreds of artists have had the bravery to put their hearts and souls on the walls of galleries for the public to accept, reject or pass opinions on. These acts of courage give metaphorical force to what seemed frivolous performance art by Martin Creed, the visiting English artist. When he filled a gallery with balloons, opened the door and let them float off to their fate, it was like our artists sending their work into the world and adding enormously to the life of the city.
