The galleries: Koru casts powerful spell

Paul Dibble's powerful The Unfolding, flows like a stream but swoops like a predator. Picture / Dean Purcell

Casting large bronze sculpture is one of the great feats of art. One of the most amazing pieces of writing about art is the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini's account of casting his bronze statue of Perseus for the Medici in Florence.

In a week exceptionally rich in art, the most spectacular exhibition is by Paul Dibble, whose bronze sculpture is at the Gow Langsford Gallery until May 6. He often works on the large scale where sculpture meets light engineering.

Dibble uses the lost-wax process of casting bronze, a technique as old as Western civilisation.

Dibble also uses sand casting, the staple of 19th-century engineering as well as space-age ceramics.

These techniques make possible such huge flowing pieces as The Unfolding, which dominates this show. The work is 2.5m high, with sweeping curves that simultaneously evoke a woman, a dolphin or a bird.

It swoops like a predator but flows like a stream. It is a wave and a hook. It incorporates that most New Zealand of motifs, the koru form.

There is a blade like an axe, yet it also has an intimate passage that evokes the vagina and the womb.

Some of the curves are tightly geometric but there is also a richness and warmth in the shape of the thigh.

It is this heavy, warm shape that contributes to the monumentality of the piece allied to the movement and vitality of its curves.

Although it is a comparatively slender work it looks as spectacular from the front as it does from the side.

From in front, the spectacular forms suggest a flow of long hair and have the controlling force of fins.

It is a masterly work, a culmination of Dibble's long career of imaginative form and technological skill.

The smaller works, including the model for The Unfolding, can be cast in limited editions.

The koru motif is everywhere and gives the feeling of thrust and wave-like motion. It is balanced by the geometry of a sphere, and blade-like edges which add tension and force.

The smaller works call on many things, from architectural construction through to the familiar pendants and hooks.

The least of them, such as Pacific Comb, is never less than splendidly ornamental. But even a sculpture small enough to be overlooked, such as Soft Geometric, has a powerful feel of moulding and working brought to a final shape that is not only satisfactorily tactile but also incorporates something of our coast and our culture. How appropriate that Dibble should be the artist to create the memorial to our war dead in Hyde Park in London.

Much more particular to place and moment are the super-realistic paintings of George Baloghy at Artis Gallery in Parnell until May 17.

These paintings concentrate mostly on Mt Eden village and the hill behind, although there is a nod in the direction of Mt Victoria and Three Kings.

Mt Eden is a leafy suburb and Baloghy captures this well, along with the rhythm of the suburban roofs. He is also very successful in the paintings that convey the way Mt Eden Rd thrusts decisively through the suburb.

His draughtsmanship is equal to painting cars very accurately and his composition, as always, makes good use of road signs, shops and inscriptions generally.

His colour tidies things up a little. The mouldering facade of a building in Mt Eden village is given a uniform colour.

It wouldn't be Baloghy if there were not some extra twists to the works, such as the group from Manet's Dejeuner Sur l'herbe taking their lunch on the grass on Mt Eden. The group includes a self-portrait.

Baloghy is also prepared to shift Mt Eden itself bodily from north to south of the village when it is needed to complement the buildings and retain the character of the place.

It is also very Baloghy to set builders and planners by a plinth on Mt Victoria and call them conspirators.

No show could be more intensely local than this. Even the king and queen of Mt Eden can be seen crossing the road.

It is an unfashionable, ordinary style done with extraordinary skill and intensity. Baloghy even gets energy into a traffic jam.

Nothing could be less local than the Allan Wright exhibition Out of Line, at the McPherson Gallery until April 22.

These are abstract works although there is a link - in the washes of blue and green that are his principal surfaces - with his previous images of boats and voyaging. And the lines he marks across the surfaces suggest the rulings of charts and blueprints and directional indications.

The works appear plain but are full of incidents. There are the incidents at the edges where the process of layering is made plain. Sometimes the surfaces are rubbed for an effect of ageing. Sometimes a curve adds spring to the lines. There are little grid markings and even numerals hammered into the surface with a punch.

The support on which the work is done is important to Wright who uses plywood, panels, and the coarse surfaces of jute and the fine texture of linen to give delicate and meditated variations from one painting to another.