Sweeping power of the life force

By T.J. McNAMARA

This exhibition is something to wonder at: strong yet delicate, full of movement yet monumental, apparently spontaneous but deeply considered, vivid and sombre, personal but also abstract and universal.

It is Illuminations, paintings by Auckland artist Gretchen Albrecht, that grace the City Gallery until July 28.

The gallery's second floor is given over to the work in an exhibition that would be outstanding anywhere in the world.

It is made up of two major sequences: the oval and hemispherical paintings that are her most distinctive contribution to New Zealand art. The surrealist work she did when she was the product of a renewal of art teaching at Elam School of Fine Arts and the cloud and landscape paintings of her early maturity are not represented.

Although the paintings are restricted to only two variants of form, there is a grand variety of mood and substance. The formats are supported by two kinds of movement, the wave and the vortex, conveyed in a strongly physical way by sweeps of colour where we can feel the movement of the arm that made them.

Yet these paintings are more than conventional "action" paintings. Many celebrate the force of nature in growing things and others ponder the death of her father.

The titles help to explain the development from "garden" paintings to cosmological images. The semicircular ones are often divided into two quadrants, leaving a tall join in the middle. Colour opposition is used to emphasise contrasts.

The most obvious are paintings like Summer Fire: Winter Smoke, where red and grey are intermingled with shades of green. There is a similar juxtaposition in In Memory of My Father, where the light of life moves into the darkness of death.

Such opposition of symbolic colour is developed from such traditional themes as the Annunciation, where the Angel and Mary placed opposite each other are clad in symbolic colour. Often the paintings are simply dazzling in their richness. The purple and orange Emperor, the red and orange Dervish or green, purple red and blue in Solomon's Song make symphonic harmonies.

Analogies with music are particularly relevant. Together, the paintings are called Seasonal and recall music by Vivaldi and Haydn. At the centre of each is an upward driving column of force and growth and beyond that are sweeps of stunning colour.

Another room is given over to a group of paintings called The Seven Sorrows, which show poise and stillness against the dark cloud of unknowing.

These are oval paintings and they use the romantic swirl of the vortex to give depth. Renaissance artists such as Piero Della Francesca are among 10 mentioned in connection with Albrecht's work but this is in reference to her colour as well as the curved shapes. The vortex owes a lot to Turner, who made the stormy spiral a special part of his compositions.

Albrecht uses the vortex swirling constantly but her special note is to place bars of solid colour - strong, formal, rectangular shapes against the void.

What makes both so effective is the way the colour is applied in tremendous sweeps, done with an instrument like a plasterer's trowel which achieves transparency and sweeping movement.

The power of the sweep, inspired by the sea, the sea's light and its waves, culminates in the immense and wonderful specially commissioned work which has a room to itself. Aotearoa-Cloud is the biggest work the artist has done. The room has been painted dark blue and against this the work thunders as a great wave across the surface held firm by two long bars of white. It has simplicity that comes from enormously complex knowledge and thought.

This is not so much an exhibition to be reviewed, as a life force to be celebrated.