Revamping, revitalising stock

From The Stockroom
Sue Crockford
1 April - 27 April 2010

This stock show presents seventeen works from ten artists. It includes some surprises and some revitalisations within a new group context.

The Billy Apples haven’t been displayed before, three small Xeroxes (from 1966) on coloured canvas that looks like gingham tablecloth patterns. The smudgy photocopied ink shows a grinning apple positioned alongside an inert Idaho spud, while the title ‘Apple in Idaho’ refers to the (now) proper names of people, vegetables, and of course, North American states.

Next to Apple are three Ava Seymour framed photographed collages with super finely-tweaked edges. The outer contours of her paper shapes you need to examine closely to grasp the nuanced precision with which her scalpel has moved. From a cutting virtuoso.

Peter Robinson’s two large calligraphic paintings look better in a group show than in a solo display where they don’t stand out as black and white statements, with so much white around them. Here with some colourful Mrkusichs nearby, they seem activated spatially and become highly energised grotesque landforms - quoting earlier, non-landscape, ‘quantum’ Peter Robinsons.

Julian Dashper’s solitary illuminated neon tube on a white wall with hanging wires on either side presents itself as a delicate – but glowing - linear drawing. The wires could almost be pencil lines within a calculatedly 'minimal' statement.

Opposite the gallery entrance is an early Gordon Walters koru painting from 1965. It intrigues because of the awkward top and bottom edges which explain the title, Black on White. It is definitely not vice versa, like the more resolved and spatially ambiguous works he later arrived at.

Of the two very different Mrkusich works, the smaller single-panelled blue painting (as opposed to the three panelled, three coloured one) has an intriguing tension by virtue of a symmetry at the top and an asymmetry at the bottom. It oddly twists the central field.

In the back room a mid-seventies Albrecht is a gorgeous stack of floating, horizontal stains, oddly divided into two halves, one placed above the other, while nearby a big black Hotere of shiny corrugated steel has its two panels spaced apart to form the vertical beam of a cross. Its arms consist of horizontally cut slots peeled away to reveal bright orange painted on the back.

There is also an oddly sinister Boyd Webb, with the clustered stamens of an ochry brown fabric flower in a shadow - exuding menace.

In thinking about shows like this, I tend to prefer solo exhibitions over group displays, and of the latter, thematically tight presentations over promotion of unsold stock. Yet the latter often allow us to spot things we might have originally missed, a chance to stumble on new connections – especially with more historic work that may be owned by an artist’s family, not an institution. A good opportunity.

Nice rectangle

Gretchen Albrecht: Rose Gardens and the Deep Sea Swell
Sue Crockford, Auckland
29 April - 24 May 2008

This is a surprisingly varied show for Albrecht, and that is good, for often her work looks churned out and repetitive. Sensual, technically proficient, but too ubiquitous. Here we have some small framed works on paper in the back (stock) gallery, And the Deep Sea Swell, a large blue and green canvas hemisphere out front (with a tiny little oil on copper hemisphere on the same wall), Threshold -Threnos a big low rectangular triptych on the wall by the door, and several horizontal canvas ovals (Rose Gardens).

Those ovals are not a stable shape like the two-part, flat bottomed hemispheres, and their thin horizontal lines of green can’t provide them with a needed firm anchor. The liveliest ones are energised with wildly turbulent splashed underpainting, but their similarity to the hemispheres in chromatic mood undermines their identity as painted objects.

The most interesting work by far is the long, three part (three coloured) rectangle. The grey-brown righthand panel in particular looks refreshing because Albrecht’s characteristic sumptuous colour, with its suggestions of the courtly and crushed velvet curtains, is not present. It seems brooding and sullen, and not about light on fabric. It is as if a little atmospheric dirty umber crept in (courtesy of Mrkusich perhaps?).

With a linear rectangle hovering within the triptych, and an advancing mauve centre, Albrecht now seems to be exploring a new sort of space, with drier, brusherly (unstained) paint and tight architectural structure. There is something of a brutalist concrete bunker lurking in this nicely proportioned painting and that is exciting. She is using optical restraint and drawing the viewer inside the work, with less emphasis upon its surface. Smart move.