Max Gimblett: The Brush of All Things at Auckland Art Gallery

By JOSIE MCNAUGHT

Cops in New York don't like being treated like surrogate street maps. But I was running late and in a strange part of the city.

"I'm looking for Bowery," I said, but pronounced the "bow"as in "bow tie". The two cops, hands hovering over their holsters, stared at me. "I need to know if it's left or right," I said pointing, "Bowery, Bowery, please, which way is it?"

Finally a glimmer of recognition, and pointing down the street, the cop closest to me yelled in my face: "Bowery, you want Bowery" - except he said it as in "bow wow".

Before I could thank them, they had turned away, eyes trawling up the street the other way. They could afford to turn their backs to me - I was just another daft tourist, not one of those elusive terrorists all the cops in the city seem to be programmed to look out for.

Ten minutes later I was reporting my experience to Max Gimblett as he and his assistant Anthony Fodero fixed me a delicious lunch. It seemed appropriate such a quintessential New York experience should be recounted among such quintessential New York surroundings: a spacious loft converted into living areas, studio, library and home to Gimblett and his wife Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett for the past 30 years.

Gimblett, who left his birthplace, New Zealand, in 1959 to seek an artistic career, must have heard dozens of similar stories from the many Kiwis who have found their way to his sanctuary on Bowery. But, unlike most of the city-dwellers I've come in contact with, he's prepared to indulge me and laugh at my small story.

I have run the gauntlet of the NYPD, not just to have a great lunch (and my first decent cup of coffee in this city), but to talk to Gimblett about his upcoming show at Auckland Art Gallery - his first survey exhibition in a public institution in New Zealand.

Covering the period 1977-2004, The Brush of All Things is curated by Wystan Curnow, with catalogue essays by Thomas McEvilley and Curnow, and an interview with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

It follows the eponymously titled award-winning monograph, published in 2002 by Craig Potton Publishing, in association with Gimblett's Auckland dealers, Gow Langsford, and featuring essays by Curnow and John Yau, as well as beautiful reproductions of Gimblett's work.

Apart from a brief period in Toronto (1962-64) as a potter, Gimblett has been primarily a painter, although the upcoming exhibition will feature his sculpture and drawings as well. Gimblett might be based in New York, but for the past 25 years he has returned to New Zealand almost every year to exhibit and create new work.

Gimblett describes The Brush of All Things as a chunk of the opus, rather than a retrospective. It's also likely the first chance many New Zealanders will have to see a comprehensive collection of his work.

"Although I don't think it's widely known, my work has tremendous support in New Zealand among the collecting audience. They would be one of the most highly attuned audiences in the world and they are gutsy when it comes to collecting. The visual arts get a lot of support."

Gimblett thinks it has something to do with the size of the country. New Zealand is "a bit of a tribe", and artists are not anonymous, so collectors are less likely to buy for investment, and more likely to buy because they think a work is beautiful and they know someone who knows the artist.

"It's a family thing and very common in New Zealand."

Gimblett is being drawn back into the bosom of his birthplace "family", through the show, and a two-month residency he takes up this month at Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University. When we meet, he's just arrived back from a visit to Auckland Art Gallery to organise the show, and shoot a video that will appear in the exhibition.

He is pleased with the filming which shows him immersed in the creative process. When we view some of the raw footage later on, it is loud, intense and mesmerising. Paint is hurled across the canvas and Gimblett commits himself totally to the physical task of painting. This is a different Max from the benign, almost jovial figure chatting to me in his studio.

But equally he's not about to hand over the interview on a platter. I am going to have to work for my story, and like the audience who will be seeing his work for the first time through this exhibition, get to a level of understanding about his art.

Gimblett is a prolific artist and has exhibited in Australia, Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain and Denmark, as well as the US. A glance over the corporate holders of his work reads like a who's who of world finance - and that's without the public institutions that range from MoMA in New York, to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to the British Library in London, to Auckland Art Gallery.

Gimblett references Buddhism, Christianity, classical mythology, alchemy and Jung. He draws together Western and Eastern influences for his works that combine acrylic paints and metals such as gold and silver. He also pays homage to Len Lye, describing him in the foreword to the monograph as his "teacher".

For the exhibition, Gimblett's career has been divided into distinct categories. "The calligraphy paintings will be in the first room, then my 1970s and 80s geometric period, followed by the room of sacredness, then the room of passion and current works, where the video will be played."

So far so safe, but then Gimblett introduces some unusual drawings.

Compared to his signature gilded quatrefoils, luminous oval paintings, and other abstract expressionist works on rectangles, circles and squares, these deceptively simple drawings are disturbing, unsettling. You get the impression Gimblett is dealing with demons in the only way he knows how, but that would be taking the art back to the artist, and Gimblett wants the viewer to take it "to the self".

Gimblett agrees they are difficult drawings.

"It's the self of shadow. The Jungians believe there's a compensation for consciousness into the unconsciousness and we repress a lot of material. That's where your shadow lies. It's usually something we are not able to reach because it's repressed or challenging. It's a way of doing some work, and not wanting to repress it any further, but when it comes through, you let it come out. It's what one's conscious life doesn't want to acknowledge is going on."

What is going on for Gimblett is an exhibition that's been in the making, he says, for the past 20 years. He has never had a show like this, in New Zealand or anywhere, but he acknowledges it is in the natural order of things.

"I am 68 and I have been painting since 1963." He stops and adds with a sudden shout of deep laughter, that echoes around the studio, the sort of loud, proud bark of laughter you hear constantly on the streets of New York: "I think my time has come - before my time is up."

* Josie McNaught's flights to New York were sponsored by Qantas.