New gallery reflects a certain frame of mind

By ADAM GIFFORD


Art business is fickle. Young artists wonder how to get a dealer. Older artists can't get a deal they're happy with.

"You become old school. Dealers don't want to look at what you are showing now," says Alvin Pankhurst, who with Brent Wong has started Real Gallery to show the work of "realist/surrealist" artists.

Both are name artists with careers stretching back more than 30 years, but Pankhurst says the last show he was offered involved handing over a 50 per cent commission to the dealer, as well as paying for advertising, catering, framing and $2000 a week to rent the gallery walls.

Solo dealer shows don't suit their way of working, either. Their work is painstakingly executed and they find it hard to build up the number of works needed for solo shows.

Real Gallery gives them somewhere to show individual paintings as they become ready, as well as work by other artists with similar concerns. It opened this month with a group show, Realism/Surrealism.

"We want people to admire the skill," says Pankhurst. The location, behind Newmarket swimming pool, should be more accessible than Pankhurst's previous gallery ventures, the first in Pakuranga and second, Spiral, which was up some stairs in Queen St.

The pair have been friends since the 1970s, when both had works chosen for the then Benson & Hedges Art Award, the annual showcase for the nation's modernist talent.

Pankhurst's entry, Urban Sprawl, depicted creepers coming through the window of an old villa and merging with the room.

It was Pankhurst's second painting since a fire destroyed all his work and possessions and left him in Wellington Hospital for months with burns to 33 per cent of his body.

"Coming out of that I thought, if I had died, what would I have left behind? So I decided, even if I do one painting, I will put everything into it."

While recuperating, Pankhurst discovered that, for $5 a week, he could rent a house in nearby Wallace St awaiting demolition for hospital extensions.

"I had 10 people living there, sharing the rent. It was a great house. They didn't tell us to get out - we just woke one morning with a bulldozer on the doorstep."

Wary of painting in oils after the fire, Pankhurst painted in tempera, a technique where dry pigment is mixed with egg yolk. "You end up in a room smelling of rotten eggs. It's not the greatest aphrodisiac."

Perhaps for the sake of his love life, he switched to acrylic, and has only recently returned to oil painting.

In 1974 Pankhurst won the Benson & Hedges Award with Maybe Tomorrow, which was bought by the Dunedin Public Art Galley for $5000 - the highest price paid at that point for a painting by a New Zealand artist, living or dead. The win did not please the guardians of antipodean modernity, but Pankhurst stayed true to his course.

In some ways his work is as pre-determined as any conceptual stunt: "With most work, once you have worked out the painting, it becomes an exercise. You know what you are doing. It just takes time and patience to execute."

Wong made a big impact in the late 1960s and early 1970s with his paintings of architectural forms floating above bare landscapes.

"It was right out of the subconscious. Here was this landscape, and all this unresolved stuff in the midst," he says. "All the work I do is reflective of some sort of state."

The architectural forms disappeared years ago. While on the surface Wong is working with the land, sea and cloud forms he sees from his Muriwai studio, his rarely exhibited experimental work, or as he calls it, "inspirational", shows his main concern is light.

"It has to do with being in a certain frame of mind. I see the light from the top of a saucepan ... and because I'm in a certain state of mind I'll see it in a certain way, and I'll make a study of that."

Exhibition

* What: Realism/Surrealism, by Alvin Pankhurst, Brent Wong, Graham Downs, Craig Primrose

* Where and when: Real Gallery, 27 Davis Cres, Newmarket, to Oct 30