Wystan Curnow and John Yau: Max Gimblett

Reviewed by PETER SIMPSON*

Max Gimblett's paintings are extremely easy on the eye - their shapes are intriguing and their colours and textures are sensuously seductive - but they also invite contemplation and reverie. This monograph, the first to be published on his work, records and reflects upon more than 25 years of potent image-making.

Handsome, well-designed and copiously illustrated, the book has a text by two authors - Wystan Curnow, a New Zealander, and John Yau, an American - who have both had a long association with the artist. The dual arrangement seems appropriate given that Gimblett's career has, unusually, been conducted in two countries. Born in Auckland in 1935, Gimblett eventually settled in New York and began exhibiting almost simultaneously from the mid-1970s in both the US and New Zealand.

Plenty of New Zealand artists have chosen to live and work abroad (Alexis Hunter, Boyd Webb); others have returned after a period away to work in New Zealand (Jeffrey Harris, Billy Apple). But Gimblett is almost unique in the frequency of his returns and the on-going conduct of his career in two distinct locations. He seems to be motivated by both professional and psychological imperatives.

Curnow argues that the confrontational directness of Gimblett's 1980s paintings and the lushness, beauty and overt spirituality of his more recent work are a reaction to the darkness and puritanical restraint of the New Zealand artistic psyche (typified by Colin McCahon).

John Yau, a Chinese American, also makes much of Gimblett's dual heritage, asserting that, like the Romanian Constantin Brancusi, he made "an imaginative connection of the local with a larger, more radical mode of art-making". Gimblett's childhood memories of "looking into rock pools at low tide" and early contact with Polynesian and Asian art through frequent visits to the Auckland Museum produced, when fed through the New York vortex, "an imaginative synthesis of widely different traditions".

Both Curnow and Yau argue for a division of Gimblett's career into two distinct phases, marked by a mid-life year of reassessment in 1982 during which no painting was attempted. The phase up to 1982 was marked by large square (or circular) hard-edged abstract canvases in which single or double vertical bands were placed on monochromatic fields of a single, usually contrasting, colour.

Examples reproduced include Blue/Red - To Len Lye (1977), in both square and circular (tondo) format, a red circle inside a blue circle. (Gimblett regards Lye as his teacher.) In Red/Blue - Barbara's Red (1977) the pattern of colours is reversed. Such works, says Yau, are "tough and uncompromising, as well as optically rich and rigorously geometric".

After what Gimblett calls his "mid-life transformation" he changed tack. In place of squares or circles his supports became quatrefoils (formed from four intersecting circles - a format which has since become Gimblett's "signature", as in Buddah Amida, 1985, or The Golden Flower, 2000) and other non-standard shapes including ovals (Crossing, 1990-91) and ziggurats (Crown, 1991).

Also, acrylic paint gave way to a dazzling array of new materials including metallic pigments, polymers and resins.

Early on Gimblett, immersed in Asian cultures and religions, produced numerous ink drawings in a manner inspired by Japanese brush-and-ink artists. The book opens with some fine black-and-white photographs of the artist in action. More recently, this spontaneity and improvisational boldness has entered his paintings, too, with remarkable results. In full maturity Gimblett has a rich repertoire of forms and effects at his disposal, as revealed in more than 100 works excellently reproduced in colour in this outstanding and well-documented publication.

* Craig Potton Publishing with Gow Langsford Gallery $99

* Peter Simpson is an associate professor of English at the University of Auckland