KEY POINTS:
Three exhibitions this week are intriguing because they show the work of a young artist, an artist in mid-career and a long-established artist.
The young artist is Eddie Clemens whose bright exhibition Captive is at the Sue Crockford Gallery. Pens in banks and post offices linked to the desk by a tiny chain of balls are known as "captive pens" and they play a large part in this exhibition. Captive suggests confinement but these are light-hearted, clever works not to be taken too seriously.
They are in the fashionable genre that goes as far back as Duchamp of taking found objects and shifting them into an art setting. The sculpture that meets your eye as you come through the door is a triumph of bling. It is like cheap jewellery. Little chains loop like fake pearls but the pendants on the pearls are pens and they bleed ink on the wall.
In the gallery itself an open umbrella with its spike thrust into the wall is hung with a spider's web of chains, suggesting an establishment order that has become dusty with time. Nearby, a line of folded umbrellas are stuck horizontally in the wall and hung with decoration. Their thrust and the chains make the aggression prettified.
Commentary at the show says these are "vindictive tropes" that satirise modern life. It is a thin satire and looks more like window dressing.
More touching are the plastic clothes-drying racks on the floor of the gallery. These can be seen on innumerable balconies of the apartment blocks crowding the city and they can be arranged in various ways. The racks on show work through all the permutations. All are adorned with clear drops like tears. Do these household objects weep for the vagaries of life? Almost, but not quite. They are not elegiac; they just look wet.
These clever works have been acknowledged with academic recognition and the Frances Hodgkins fellowship next year. Clemens is a talent on the way up. His inventiveness and wit is plain to see; real depth in his work is still to come.
At the Bath Street Gallery Gregor Kregar has one of his characteristic sprawling exhibitions, titled Immersive Echoes, where the sum of the pieces is greater than the weight of individual works. His art has developed through many different forms. His last show was of garden gnomes, some chromium-plated.
There is a bright, reflective quality in this exhibition too. The sculptures are complex geometric structures made from triangles of highly-polished stainless steel and the prints shiny photographic images. But for all their brightness they are restless.
The basic module is geometric but the structures created with it are far from symmetrical. They lift and twist and thrust aggressively outward. The works on the floor have the poise that comes from being balanced on points. They have lift to go with their tension.
The sculptures are accompanied by large prints of aerial views of great cities, broken into fragments interspersed with areas of blue sky or sea with soft masses of cloud.
The fragments are brought together in ways that make them rich and tense but defy logic. They have a cold brightness of mass production and never feel quite comfortable.
This powerful show has an overall feeling of intellectual endeavour that makes objects reflecting cities and structures around the world. They also reflect the cold impersonality of things where only the clouds carry an emotional charge.
Throughout his long career Raymond Ching has been famous for his paintings of birds. His Book of British Birds sold millions of copies. His problem has been the difficulty of shifting from illustration to art, to deepen the thought under the splendid surface. In his new show called Autobiography at Artis Gallery he delves deep by making the work intensely personal while still giving each painting its independence.
The paintings are all done on a background made up of the comics, like the Katzenjammer Kids he knew in childhood, which surely led him towards drawing but are also deeply nostalgic.
Against this background he does figures of women who may at some stage have inspired him. They appear to float among the birds that fill the paintings. On the edges is an autobiography with oblique reference to the birds and the women. Surprisingly, for so precise a painter, the writing is scrawled and made deliberately difficult to read.
The images are easy to read on the surface. A mournful woman holds in her lap a specimen of the extinct huia. Together they suggest the sad remembrance of things past. In this painting the speech balloons trail from the bird's beak, limp and fading.
One huge painting called The World Will Call You Out is crowded with dozens of birds and two of the female figures, one of which carries a kiwi as the whole composition swoops across toward an unknown destination. There are constant references to expatriation.
Ching is as brilliant as ever but more obscure than usual.
At the galleries
What: Captive, by Eddie Clemens
Where and when: Sue Crockford Gallery, Endeans Building, 2 Queen St, to Oct 14
TJ says: Bright young artist doing the fashionable thing very inventively.
What: Immersive Echoes, by Gregor Kregar
Where and when: Bath Street Gallery, 43 Bath St, to Nov 1
TJ says: Glittering accomplished sculpture and prints without a heart.
What: Autobiography, by Ray Ching
Where and when: Artis, 280 Parnell Rd, to Nov 9
TJ says: The master of realism combines birds, portraits and the comic books of his childhood in images with oblique references to expat autobiographical experience.
