Jensen group show

E=MC2 (Innes: Sandback: Umberg)
Jensen
22 April - 29 May 2009

In this exhibtuion Andrew Jensen has selected these three artists to contribute two works each in a show that could be about quantum physics (the above 2 is meant to signify ‘squared’) - not so much referencing time and its experienced materiality, as phenomena such as black holes and the intangibility of surface.

Fred Sandback’s two minimalist sculptures are very distinctive with their use of tautly stretched double threads of black (sometimes grey) acrylic yarn to suggest planes. When not implying solid sheets, these wondrously intriguing lines push the eye up into the rafters to check out the nearby wiring and grid formations of the parallel wooden beams, or below, the oil, ink and paint stains on the oft repaired concrete floor.

The two Sandback works are quite different. One is a single box shape with no lid (like a U) in front of a long white wall. The other is of three vertical rectangles where two are on the same plane but separated by the distance of their own width. Projecting out from halfway between them, at a right-angle, is the third oblong.

In contrast to such linear austerity, Gunter Umberg’s paintings deal with spatial depth via the deepest and darkest of tones. Dry powdered black has been repeatedly applied on to wooden panels using a dammar binder brushed on in alternating horizontal and vertical strokes. This creates a very delicate woven texture. You’d swear it is from a thin light fabric but not so. The sheenless pigment creates a dense void that draws you in through the solid panels. One is like a very tall narrow doorway. The other is a square positioned high on the wall. It has thick bevelled sides that suspend the surface away from the wall so it hovers in front of it, while paradoxically creating a window through.

Callum Innes is widely known for the use of subtraction in his painting making processes, but in this show only one of the two paintings involves that, a work where a large rectangle of horizontally aligned viscous black paint has a centrally positioned thin vertical line cut down into it, and drawn on turps is used to remove inner residues.

The other work, the additive one, involves using a brush to flick specks and globules of thick red oil paint onto a canvas covered with wet shellac, and continually picking out and resetting bits of crumbling half dry paint by hand until the shellac hardens. Innes’ myriad splinterlike fragments, as with Umberg’s work, are deceptive. They look like traces remaining from the application of a solvent, but the ‘islands’ of paint remnants are much thicker. Many of the delicate traces come from slivers of oil skin that have later been relocated.

For anyone interested in the continual reinventing of paint application and process, the spatial depth achieved by superdark fields or the perceptual nuances of linear sculptural form, this is a wonderful show. A treat for lovers of abstraction.

Limited edition for the almost invisible

Julian Dashper
Untitled (Black for Fred Sandback) 2001-08 Edition #1/10
Untitled (Blue for Fred Sandback) 2001-08 Edition #1/10Te Tuhi
3 September - 3 February 2008

This project of Dashper’s continues the interest in perception that has been apparent in his recent Crockford exhibitions, where some works were hard to detect in the gallery space. The two works in this current Te Tuhi show though are harder to see than the above photos indicate. The light on the wall above the main Te Tuhi entrance is normally dimmer, making the pencil marks look fainter.

Despite Dashper’s titles referencing Fred Sandback, that artist’s acrylic yarn is a lot different from pencil as a material. It has more body and projects forward. However despite Dashper’s work being more like lines made by Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle or Sol LeWitt for example –by virtue of it being pencil - Sandback did butt coloured lines together in lithographs just as Dashper has done here with black and blue pencil. It’s a nice idea of Dashper’s to do horizontally what Sandback did diagonally.

Most people visiting Te Tuhi will not notice this work, even those who read the rather crass ‘bronze’ plaque located in the middle of what is normally the ‘drawing wall.’ It states the works’ existence, but doesn’t say where they are positioned. The sign will antagonise Dashper’s audience as a cause of frustration.

By being close to the door, the work apparently is meant to reference the Michael Parekowhai sculpture outside, its horizontality serving as a foil to Parekowhai’s verticality. However that is a far-fetched fantasy, an artist’s pipe dream. The two works normally would not make up a pair, they are so different. Dashper’s project is interesting because of his other ‘minimal’ shows that are contextually linked to it. Not because of any in situ qualities in Te Tuhi’s environs, such as acquired artworks. The connection is not convincing.

Dashper met Sandback in 2001 in Marfa, hence the dates of the works’ construction. The works are installed at Te Tuhi on long term loan until 2019 and are in an edition of ten. That means there is a restriction on the number of lines that he will create of those particular colours, pencil type, alignment and length, that he doesn’t intend to crank them out. A clever touch.

Seeing linear, thinking planar

Fred Sandback
Jensen Gallery
7 May – 21 June 2008


Andrew Jensen has been bringing some impressive overseas art to Auckland for several years now, and this new show continues that tradition. Fred Sandback (1943- 2003) was a pioneer American minimalist artist whose sculpture is little known, even in the country where he lived, the United States. Certainly his work has never been seen in New Zealand Aotearoa before.

When I say ‘minimalist’, he was not part of that important group of sculptors in the sixties that included Judd, Morris, and Andre, though he was taught by Judd and Morris. Sandback is from a later generation not interested in say, phenomenology, but in work with a very understated, ‘dematerialised’ quality. To do this he made implied forms using tightly stretched acrylic yarn: lines in space that described planes. The coloured lines describe the edges of forms the viewer cannot see, but their imagination creates invisible planes that spatially link up those edges. The work is about perceptual nuances of suggestion.

The colours are consistent within each work, as are the number of strands (between one and three) for each vertical or diagonal edge. These have their ends firmly attached to the floor, ceiling or wall.

The most impressive sculpture is the large leaning triangle in the large main gallery where the line looks as if done with a black paintstick – due to the furriness of the three parallel strands used. They combine to look thick and muscular, as if drawn by say Richard Serra.

The vertical ‘rectangle’ sculptures are interesting too, with their sets of dropping adjacent planes – especially those in Jensen’s office. Peculiar things happen when the ascending lines reach into the rafters. The suggested planes suddenly disintegrate, as they also do when the lines merge with the dark carpet below.

The prints are interesting because of their link to the sculpture, and as 2D aids in Sandback’s thinking. Yet by themselves, they are not linear wizardry, like say Josef Albers glorious linear investigations into perspectival space, for they are too simple. Their background colours dominate and operate in a way that is the opposite of the coloured lines of the sculpture.

The yarn sculptures though are very special. They have a presence, a wonderful ‘actuality’ when you stand close to them. They are not cerebral or dry, just superbly inventive – a terrific display of elegant drawing in 3D space.