The strong lines of a Germanic influence

By T.J. McNAMARA

Falstaff said he was not only witty but he also caused wit in others. The German artist and philosopher Joseph Beuys (1921-86) might well say the same. Beuys' influence is clearly apparent in two exhibitions in Auckland.

One is by the respected German artist Imi Knoebel, whose work is supported by the Goethe Institut in Wellington and runs at the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St until March 23. The other is at Artspace in Karangahape Rd and runs until March 9. It is by Mladen Bizumic.

What wit and intelligence did Beuys inspire in this disparate pair? Knoebel was his pupil at Dusseldorf and absorbed the courage to be radical and to follow any path that seemed to be valid.

Knoebel's career of more than 30 years has traced a meandering path. He spent months painting parallel lines on canvases. He then did big, three-dimensional installations that talked about space. Next he moved on to shaped canvases, then riots of colour, then assemblages where the frames of the stretcher were as important as the painting.

He dabbled in abstract expressionism and finally surrendered to the authority of 20th-century abstract art, arriving at the minimal, geometric abstract art that makes up the exhibition in Auckland.

The important thing was making a specific art object: the "thing in itself". These mature paintings are the result of a process of reduction to colour and rectangular shape - "singing architecture".

The paintings are done on sheet aluminium and the surface is level, unlike a canvas or panel. Between each rectangle of colour there is a gap of a couple of millimetres, enough to make a precise boundary.

Despite the absolute precision, their minimal geometry and the absence of message, the works are given titles that hint at how we might look at them.

Five of the paintings belong in a series called Pure Freud. They are made up of two colours. One is an upright rectangle and penetrates the other, altering how we see it as space and tone. Pure Freud 25 is pink penetrating black. Pure Freud 21 is orange penetrating orange. The most attractive of them, Pure Freud 23, is blood red, slightly shaded, that is penetrated by yellow.

The loveliest is an exceptionally large painting called Island. It takes enormous confidence to work on this scale.

The colours are unusual shades of pale green and yellow. Afloat in these areas are islands of yellow counterpointed by one vivid red and a plain area of white. It is beguiling and calm and, in its own way, beautiful. It has been sold for $200,000.

Mladen Bizumic is too young to have met Beuys, but a feature of his work at Artspace owes a great deal to him. Bizumic's thinking is conveyed by writings and drawings in white on black paper. The sheets of paper are joined and run along two walls of the gallery.

Bizumic is thinking about how museums have become more important than the art in them. He is thinking of the Guggenheim Museums - architecturally marvellous in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright in New York, of Peggy's palazzo in Venice, of Frank Gehry's glittering fish in Bilbao and the Guggenheim in Berlin. He suggests that, sooner or later, there will be a Guggenheim in Tauranga.

Because he has a way with transparencies, he includes a bright picture of the landscape you would see from the museum.

Some friends have made an animated abstraction of the verticals and horizontals of his design. The middle of the gallery is occupied by a model of the imagined museum.

The show has a typical 21st-century irony to it - it is a museum and anti-museum. The black and white emphasises positive and negative. The flat patterns of the computer-generated show are matter and anti-matter.

The mass of text shows the range of reference: Runge, Friedrich, Holderlin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Andy Warhol in one place, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Gehry, the Bilbao master, in another.

The show's real value lies not in the unreadable text but in the drawings, which cleverly express the fall of light by lines that also indicate structure. The potent use of line is similar to that early work of Imi Knoebel.