New art space makes its mark in week filled with riches

By T.J. McNAMARA

What to do in a week that has at least 18 worthwhile new exhibitions? First, acknowledge new spaces.

The Fisher Gallery in Pakuranga has been cleverly linked to the adjacent cultural centre and the result, called "te tuhi - the mark," does Manukau City proud. The opening exhibitions of work by Emily Karaka, Nigel Brown and Terry Stringer are as impressive as the new building.

Dominating the largest gallery is a huge painting by Nigel Brown of James K. Baxter as prophet. He reaches out to open the eyes of a man and woman alongside him. The work is comparable to the great Mexican muralists of last century and is exactly the sort of painting needed to inaugurate a new gallery.

Another new space is a big gallery at Webb's in Manukau Rd. The auctioneers are making this elegant new space available for exhibitions by dealer galleries from this country and overseas.

The first show is by Denys Watkins, courtesy of Anna Bibby Gallery.

These clever, stylish paintings are beautifully lacquered panels, like jewellery on a large scale with gold winking through dark brooch shapes, solid, polarised blocks or rhythmic, spinning forms and a hint of significant motifs.

They make no grand statements but the concepts are varied and clever. Complementing the paintings, sculptures dot the floor as immense, bomb-like thermos flasks with turning fans on top of them.

They are built on reminiscences of a visit to Vietnam where drinks are kept cool in vacuum flasks and fans turn continuously in the hot air. For all their polish and high degree of finish, these sculptures are like clumsy fittings in some post-modern post office and lack the visual poise, authority and style of the paintings.

A third new space is the Kenneth Myers Gallery at Scapa in Shortland St, which for its first independent exhibition is showing recent acquisitions by the university art collection.

The acquisitions have been made with a good eye and obviate the necessity of visiting the other 15 exhibitions because they present a potted account of painting and photography in the spectacularly rich Auckland art scene.

Photography is also used brilliantly in an exhibition by Julie Firth called Fall from Grace, at Artis Gallery in Parnell. Each of these works is a series of staged photographs extending horizontally, or vertically encompassing the whole length of a figure.

The Fall is emphasised by the presence of apples, often seen in sharp focus, while the other images in each panel fade softly into the rich colour that sets the atmosphere for each work.

Since the predominant colour is blue, this atmosphere is melancholy and contemplative but also tense. A typical work is Escape from Desire, where there is a progression from luminous wings in the void, past a scattering of apples and a dimly perceived face on waves of tension, through to a final panel where a pacing leg and a suitcase suggest journey and escape.

The most outstanding of these highly imaginative works is The Serpent of Desire, a tall work with the feeling of fin-de-siecle Vienna. It has the decorative quality of Gustav Klimt or his master Hans Makart.

The sinuous woman figure that winds through this work has hands raised above her head like a captive. Between her hands is a bright red apple and her feet rest on an animal skull. Nothing is explicit in this image. Objects such as keys, handcuffs and a richly bound Bible emerge from the background and fade back into it.

The Bible is recycled through the work as are other leitmotifs, such as a ring. A balustrade becomes bars to be escaped from and a pink corselet becomes a piquant symbol of captivity in the centre of the very impressive Inside the Echoes. The combination of all these details gives a baroque opulence to the works and only when too much coloured space is left vacant and the imagination falters for lack of information does the erotic splendour fade.

This exhibition explores to the full the possibilities of colour photography.