The galleries: Familiar notes, new dissonances

By TJ McNAMARA

Art in Auckland at the moment is like a grand concert. Among other things there is a fine trio, a finely orchestrated group show and a little piping, whistle-blowing noise off to the left of the orchestra.

The trio is the work of three long-established, well-recognised New Zealand artists playing their familiar tunes with great gusto. There is Gretchen Albrecht whose work Threshold is at the Sue Crockford Gallery until March 29; Ian Scott whose recent paintings are at the Ferner Gallery in Lorne St until March 22; and Greer Twiss whose wonderful show, representative of a lifetime's work, is at the New Gallery until June 2. This rich and comprehensive show needs considerable reflection and will be reviewed later.

Albrecht's abstract paintings are ovals and semi-circles. An innovation in these new works is that instead of the basic colour always sweeping around the oval form, it is softly patched into a background of horizontals and verticals.

Another change is the way the geometrical shapes which contrast mathematical rigour with the amorphous, emotional background are bigger, thicker and no longer simply bars but joined into a big, rectangular frame. Appropriately, they are called Thresholds because they offer a portal into a deep space as well as defining the surface of the canvas.

The usual constrictions apply. What works well on a large scale is less effective in a small work, especially when it is on the surface rather than soaked deep into it. This makes the works on handmade paper more deeply satisfying than the works on copper.

Overall this show reinforces all the elements present in the artist's retrospective at the Auckland City Gallery but adds little that is really new.

Scott has been off the scene for a while but his show of recent painting, In Our Backyard, is one of those exhibitions that demands attention if for no other reason than the sheer size of the painting - though images of big pin-up girls, all red nipple and bare bum, do catch the eye as well.

The show, in its clear, bold way, pulls together all the features of this painter's extraordinary evolution.

A long time ago he began with landscape, then moved on to the artistic exploration of blatant Pop images, notably of brash pin-up girls. Then he mutated into an abstract painter of boldly interlaced lattice patterns. Then came an extraordinary involvement in the ways New Zealand landscape is made into icons. The painter looked hard at other painters and the nature of their achievement and made his own paintings out of art history. All of these elements play their part in the show.

The god of our art history idolatry is Colin McCahon and Scott uses a photograph of the eroded, bleak features of his face alongside reworkings of paintings such as Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury. Against these images he poses photographs and pastiches of the work of Douglas Badcock and Peter McIntyre, two of the most prominent of our neo-Impressionist painters of the picturesque. Against these mixtures of images he also adds reference to the former sponsorship of art by breweries. Teddies, panties, nipples and licking tongues are often overlaid with trellis fencing which is what the interlaced abstraction has become.

It makes a heady mixture but the remarkable thing about this art is the big leap from intellectual pondering on history to the bold display of bosom and bum. The response required is complex and it is often hard to see the relevance of one component of the art with the others.

There are other puzzles. The painter shows splendid skills in a bewildering variety of styles as he makes his variants of other artists' work. Yet at times, particularly in the girls, the drawing appears clumsy. Is this part of the image or simply painterly crudity? The show is powerfully but oddly disturbing.

The well-orchestrated show is Money for Nothing, the first exhibition curated at Artspace by the new director, Tobias Berger. It runs until April 12 and it also deserves more extended comment than is possible this week.

But there is room to mention the dissonant, scratchy, irritated music by mostly young artists at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until March 21. Among other things there is a Parkscape by Andrew McLeod which abandons his usual architectural style for a collaged and printed scene full of detail of hedges, ditches, topiary and, astonishingly, anvils, all populated with nudes in a way that recalls Stanley Spencer's Resurrection paintings but with the sinister note of soldiers emerging from woodland in the background.

What is architectural is Brendon Wilkinson's sculpture of a cliff surmounted by a model of a famous minimal house. Within the house a grim melodrama has been played out. A dead figure sprawls near the swimming pool. Guns, binoculars, a typewriter all play their part in suggesting a story that requires the viewer's imaginative contribution to complete. This is not sculpture as we know it but it is the disturbing voice of the Apocalypse generation.