The galleries: Stacks of style and horsepower

Two exhibitions on show now sum up the year in art in Auckland. K Rd's Artspace public gallery is home to Roam by Eve Armstrong. It runs until the end of January and it's rubbish - the word is not used judgmentally but descriptively.

The main room contains big stacks of discarded cardboard rubbish. The smaller gallery has some skilled and lively collages of images of rubbish in bare landscapes, but the big impact is made by the unsaleable stacks.

The other exhibition is at the private dealer gallery, the Gow Langsford in Kitchener St. The show is called Frieze because all the paintings are the same height and they make a continuous band around the walls of this bleached-white gallery.

One of the paintings that catches the eye is Richard McWhannell's Seven Horsepower for George Stubbs.

Stubbs was a painter of horses but this is a 20th century horse - an old Austin 7 open car. The work is, in effect, a still-life and the quality of the painting lifts it above a simple illustration. It is a highly realistic image - the absolute opposite of the irregular piles of rubbish at Artspace.

In Auckland this year there has been a huge variety of styles of art. Every style has been acceptable in some measure and quarters, provided it was expressive of a bright idea.

Art in the 21st century is, like Cleopatra, full of infinite variety but, unlike Cleopatra, is democratic. You would look in vain for the mainstream or for an artist standing above the rest.

The exhibition at Gow Langsford shows all the artists in their stable and the range is from the vivid paintings of gardens by Karl Maughan past McWhannell's Austin 7 to the extreme abstractions of Dale Frank and Mervyn Williams.

One of the most striking paintings is by Dick Frizzell, who can paint anything. His Sentenced is all lettering - farm gate sign lettering but immortal New Zealand rubrics such as, "We knocked the bugger off".

Lettering has been the big thing this year. Practically everybody writes all over their paintings, for better or worse, but almost always with sincerity to drive the message across even when the visual image is too feeble to support it.

One important show where lovely classical lettering was an integral part of the whole work was the sculpture of Robert Jahnke. His take on official stamps was not only splendid sculpture but a powerful comment on officialdom.

In the middle of the democracy of choice at the dealer galleries there was an elite group of artists who made work that could function only in public galleries. Some of Jim Speer's work at the AUT St Paul St gallery was one case, but the outstanding example was et al, whose work represented New Zealand at Venice.

It seemed at this distance to be all of a piece with the rest of her work - grey, sombre and acid in tone and accompanied by a dull and grubby-looking catalogue. It is impossible to think of such bitter work in any domestic setting. That is why we have Artspace and the New Gallery.

The New Gallery was the setting for the most extraordinary exhibition this year. Mixed-up Childhood, curated by Robert Leonard, enabled us to see work by such famous names as Louise Bourgeois, the Chapman Brothers and the ceramics of the Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry. The savagery of his caustic work was mitigated by the graceful traditional shapes of the vases on which he worked.

Other overseas artists who were impressive during the year were James Casebere, with his mysterious flooded buildings and Marina Abramovic, whose video juxtaposed her naked self with the bare bones of a skeleton in a modern take on the conventional subject of memento mori. Both artists featured in Melancholia, at the Jensen Gallery which was the most thoughtful and richest group exhibition of the year.

Among the videos that have become an integral part of the art scene, the most memorable was the manipulation of a glamour image by Hye Rim Lee at the Fisher Gallery. In terms of invention it eclipsed everything else shown there, except perhaps the remarkable alchemy by which Julia Morrison transformed mops into huge flowers as a comment on the processes of art.

The Auckland City Gallery has, at present, a retrospective show by Michael Smither, our regional artist working in the way Thomas Hart Benton or Grant Wood did in America in the 1930s.

His images of Taranaki are iconic and his paintings of childhood remind us that the forcefulness of his early work came from the in-your-face aggression with which he promoted his version of truth. Other established artists who reinforced their positions were Philip Trusttum, Robert McLeod and Max Gimblett.

Among young artists Sara Hughes received the most publicity and prizes. Martin Poppelwell was probably the most original.

The most curious phenomenon was the total sellout of detailed women insects by Rosie Denant.