The galleries: Decadent fashionistas under fire

Irony is rampant along Karangahape Rd this week. It makes deadly thrusts at the very sharp exhibition called Bimbo by Jacqueline Fraser, at the Michael Lett Gallery until April 22.

Fraser uses style to attack style. This is her first exhibition in New Zealand for almost a decade and in the meantime she has pursued a career in Paris and New York.

Her work has been shown at several international events, including the recent Superstars Exhibition in Vienna, where she had a room to herself at the prominent Kunsthalle venue.

Her work, which began in New Zealand using Maori motifs fashioned with wire and bound and woven in traditional ways, has gone from strength to strength.

The show in K Rd, which focuses her ideas into showcase, glass-fronted units, is of the highest international quality and great individuality.

It focuses on the fashion scene using the postures, models, materials and style of this world.

She makes startling icons that are at once a celebration of style and a scathing attack on the infighting, jealousies and sheer decadence of the fashionistas.

Three main images are in the show, all with a bizarre, baroque elegance, but with the elegance almost pushed to the point of caricature.

The first image is Sycophant - basically, a man in an elegant suit with shades and an excessively tall astrakhan hat.

The handkerchief in the top pocket is superb silk but there is just too much of it. And this absurd excess is reflected in the fur on his shoes. The whole is beautifully ensconced in a glass case along with a bitchy remark about Prada.

Pussy is even more farouche. It is a male wearing the tiniest of blue tulle tutus around his hips. The blue sheds light on his legs and arms. He wears jewellery that is bling to the nth degree - big necklace and a brooch. He wears high heels and fringes up his legs.

For all the ambiguities there is more than a hint of some god of excess, a manifestation of Bacchus or Dionysus.

The third work, Bimbo, brings us closer to the fashion magazines which are the source of much imagery.

The model, one leg up, wears high heels again, an excessive necklace, her hair is a huge and tumbling wig, her necklace bright and glittering, her shoes are adorned with diamante. Right in the centre is the most sequinned, adorable, absurd handbag that could be conceived.

The figure embodies the character, the excess, the absurdity and yet the appeal of high fashion.

All three are remarkably conceived and beautifully carried through, with the fertile ambiguity and the possibility of multiple interpretations characteristic of outstanding art.

There is a much sharper satirical edge to the drawings and collages in the smaller gallery, which, being cleverly drawn, force the satiric point by being more angular and more deliberately bitchy in their references, notably in shrewd digs at dogs as accessories and at the adulation accorded Naomi Campbell.

This singular and accomplished exhibition is a triumphant return to the Auckland scene for Fraser.

The irony is much more muted at the exhibition called Pictures of the Lumpen Sun by Saskia Leek, at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until April 14.

Leek has received a fair share of critical adulation yet her work gets curiouser and curiouser. Each painting is tiny and surrounded by the plainest of white frames. The colour is deliberately soft pastel, unified by mixing masses of white with every shade.

The drawing is simple, the painting unenergetic and the subject matter mostly deliberately trivial.

The artist is saying that if people like pretty pictures she will make them so pretty that their sheer exaggerated kitsch becomes ironic. By making feeble paintings she makes a comment about feeble taste.

There is just enough awkwardness to make the pictures puzzling. When she paints a glasshouse there is a shapeless blob in front of it.

When she paints reflections, as in Swimming Pattern, the thatched huts of her corny island idyll are different when they are reflected in water.

And there is something odd about the reflections in the pool in front of her sweeter-than-sweet gingerbread house in Half Sight.

The extreme case of exaggerated sentimentality is in Trance, where a picture of Jesus is dissolved in the most syrupy of colours. Is this a comment on sentimental religious painting, or simply a wallow in the syrupy?

Ambiguity is one thing but confusion is another. Seldom has there been an exhibition where the purpose is so puzzling.

A show in the CBD that is well worth a visit is the sombre work of Samer Hatam, at the Edminston Duke Gallery in Lorne St until Saturday.

The artist comes from Iraq and the exhibition is called Transplant. The work is done mostly in thickly textured dark paint, often glittering with mica.

Many of the forms have the ziggurat shape of Iraqi tradition and the compositions use patterns of occupants as seen from the air.