The year in art: City Gallery spearheads vintage year

Art reviewer T.J. McNAMARA looks at the impressive contribution Auckland galleries have made over the past year.

The art scene in Auckland pivots around the City Gallery and in many ways it has been a special vintage year for it.

The major event was The Masters Eye. It brought 40 splendid paintings to the city on loan from the Melbourne Gallery, which has the best collection in the Southern hemisphere with only Sao Paulo as a possible rival.

Because of travel arrangements the paintings were mostly of modest size, but they were cleverly chosen and displayed in a way that made them accessible despite their immense value. Given the enormous growth in art history as a subject in schools it is important that students see that paintings do not exist just as slides or small reproductions in a book but have a presence and a personality related to their size and technique.

Those of us not studying for examination can take a delight in the impressive products of mind and hand and the insights into life and history they offer.

What has worked well is the division between the City Gallery and the New Gallery. The New Gallery is not perfect yet. The escalator is not popular and the entry fee is no more than a nuisance. Free Mondays should be only a start.

The City and the New Galleries played their part in major retrospectives of New Zealand contemporary art year.

Don Driver's retrospective showed how astonishingly inventive and individual he has been throughout his career and the Pat Hanly retrospective was a paean in favour of joy, colour and humanism. Hanly's deep involvement in social issues has always been triumphantly matched with his lyric gift and this exhibition was a fine demonstration of the combination.

Both the Ralph Hotere and the Bill Hammond were touring shows. The Hotere exhibition was a comparatively small cross-section of his output allied to Out the Black Window; it provided a long-deserved tribute and enabled Auckland to see his great work Black Phoenix, surely a national treasure.

Bill Hammond's 23 Big Pictures was a mid-career exhibition rather than a true retrospective. It came from the Dunedin Art Gallery and it was surprising to see how the south hailed Hammond as if he were a new discovery when his art has been well-established and appreciated here from his radical beginnings. His Placemakers 1 first seen here in 1996, must take the title of the most reproduced painting of the year, but its accolades are well-deserved. It is a grand and solemn painting.

At the end of the year it is good to see the gallery's own collections celebrated in Tooth and Claw and in the well-displayed show of contemporary art upstairs in the New Gallery. The City Gallery is a fine and public place and the tour buses should stop there as they do at the museum.

All of the artists mentioned had their original showings in the necessary forum of a dealer gallery. These continue to come and go. Dealing in contemporary art is a precarious business and any new gallery must find an individual place somewhere in the spectrum, which ranges from conservatism to the extreme avant-garde, and be recognised in that place.

This year the dealer galleries have offered artists as different as Callum Innes, who is big in Britain, and Star Gossage, Josephine Do and Emma McLellan, bright young New Zealand talents.

An artistic purlieu has developed around the Kitchener St and Khartoum Place area with some excellent galleries clustered between Khartoum Place and Victoria St - an area where the first Auckland Art Society building once stood.

There are other clusters of galleries that gain by proximity in Parnell and in Devonport. Karangahape Rd is also taking a place in the art scene. Not only is there Artspace but also the Ivan Anthony Gallery which has helped to establish a new generation of artists. And there's the Lightbox exhibition space, which has recently featured a fascinating display of lighting and recycled materials in Virtualight: Space Junk, by Peter Stoneham, the best exhibition of this kind for years.

Artspace remains a rather chilling space but has proved its worth by not only staging work by local artists but, increasingly, work from overseas, especially German assemblage and sculpture. Showing the work of Karin Sander was a real coup.

The Fisher Gallery in Pakuranga and Lopdell House in Titirangi have, in their own ways, also proved extremely adaptable to the kind of exhibition that is outside the scope of dealer galleries. Work by artists as distinguished as Greer Twiss continues to be shown there.

Another necessary function is the exhibition of students' work which, these days, is often at an astonishing level of accomplishment. The George Fraser Gallery performs this function for the Elam School of Fine Arts.

The polytechnics have been notable for the fine design of their publicity and catalogues.

With the first Auckland Triennial, Exotic Paradise, filling three venues in March and April, the future looks just as exciting.

2000: Year in review

2000: Month by month