The galleries: Vivid difference in shades of experience

Works like Ralph Hotere's 'Mururoa Sunrise' blaze with rich and vivid colours.

Where has all the colour gone? Colour marked the contrast between artists of established reputation and new talents on the scene in exhibitions this week.

Tribute is a show stylishly spaced around the New Gallery and draws on the city's collection, the Chartwell Trust and some work from private collections.

The works are by visual artists the Arts Foundation have declared to be Icons of New Zealand Art or have been given the status of laureates.

An important feature of the work is colour. In one gallery there are paintings by Ralph Hotere where quiet lines of dreaming fall through the darkness of night and, even more spectacularly, two works blaze with splendidly worked forms in vivid red.

In Mururoa Sunrise the red has the blaze of protest and the intensityof flame.

On the opposite wall is a splendid progression of panels by Milan Mrkusich, his second version of a Journey painting. It moves from left to right, from darkness toward light, and ends with a bold assertion of rich colour. In each panel the colour is reinforced by varying the surface with a subtle variety of touch.

In an adjacent gallery Julia Morrison works her magic by laying gold over a red under-painting, just as the early Renaissance painters did, and bracing her image by a pyramid shape with all its geometric, religious and alchemical overtones.

The work of the outstanding potter Len Castle, justifiably one of the 20 lifetime icons, is notable for vessels lined with rich red and blue glazes.

Another craftsman, Humphrey Ikin, decorates chaste, simple forms of his serving table with discrete numbers in red. Ann Robinson's cast vases and pods are wondrous things of translucent colour.

The floral tributes photographed by Michael Parekowhai that memorialise battle long ago, and the giant pick-up sticks that make sculpture out of childhood memories are brightly coloured.

This imaginatively conceived show which reminds us of the wonderful achievements of local art and craft does include work in black and white.

Peter Peryer's photographs combine a documentary quality with their insights into the strangeness of things and people and are more forceful in black and white than they would ever be in colour.

The illusionist precision of Neil Dawson's sculpture stands out in black line against the white walls of the gallery. Ronnie van Hout's Everyman as a gorilla in a suit must, of course, be in grey.

This cross-section of the work of our most renowned modern artists is a first-class exhibition. There is an entrance charge.

In Headway, the New Artists Show 2006 at Artspace until September 2, the most colourful thing is the fine poster for the show. In the artists' work, colour is conspicuously absent.

There is one notable exception: an oil drum plated with gold. It glows at the centre of islands of rock that make up the three scenes of The Western Way by Martin Basher which dominates the main gallery.

It is an extraordinary object with the gold emphasising the dribble of black oil that runs down its side.

A solitary bright butterfly on one of the other islands is the only other note of intense colour.

The piece is an apocalyptic vision of a place where oil is as costly as gold, where only pine trees grow amid a rubble of rock and concrete, and where all food is processed.

This scenario is symbolised by a shopping trolley filled with canned meat. The point is well made but lacks the attendant horror that would accompany this future.

The rest of the artists show work that is clever but dry and colourless, admirable but unexciting.

Andrew Barber follows the example of Billy Apple by transforming a space - the washroom at Artspace - into a large abstract painting. He has the confidence to work on a large scale but sticks with black and white.

Clare Noonan shows a trace of someone's passing by displaying enlarged feet on gridded paper but the feet are pale grey. Her preoccupation with journeying extends to another work with two pale wax feet upside down on the floor with a compass embedded in one heel.

The work of Robert Hood is a wide table of ceiling tiles. We are expected to get down to floor level to see a video tucked away under it.

Fiona Connor presents a glass door - an almost exact copy of the doors in the gallery - made a work of art by being stood uselessly by a real door. She is redeemed by some very fine drawings hidden in the corridor at the back of the gallery.

In a room to itself is a curious work in brown paint over photocopied images by Tessa Laird. It deals with kumara cultivation and distribution. What makes it different from a simple display is the way the painted additions add a layer of history and myth, and more than a touch of irony.

It is understandable these young artists avoid anything consciously beautiful. They would see that as irrelevant.

Yet the sense of cool detachment they cultivate and their devotion to conceptual art handicap any strong emotional response to their work.