Vary and Umberg at Jensen

Gϋnter Umberg & Elizabeth Vary: New works
Jensen Gallery
16 March - 1 May 2010

We have here a visual ‘conversation’ between a German couple using different ‘sentences’ that consist of groups of paintings - something vaguely related to the earlier interesting project Gow Langsford did with Simon Ingram and James Cousins, but not using sequences of pairings.

Umberg and Vary don’t mingle their paintings physically in clusters, or collaborate on single works, or even juxtapose them. Instead – with the help of a new temporary wall Andrew Jensen has installed in the centre of his very large gallery – they talk to each other across space, chatting through various salient similarities and contrasts and even mimicries.

Both these painters make sculptural objects that project out from the wall. In Umberg’s case he shows you from the side the supporting screws sticking out from the wall - they are not hidden inside the painted panel they hold up. He paints on solid wooden panels that present the painted rectangular front plane parallel to the wall, with the sides tilting back diagonally and hidden from the front. Vary on the other hand, tends to paint on chunky blocks or slabs made of cardboard. Occasionally her separate components lock together, like in a puzzle.

Umberg’s paint is highly light-absorbent, dark, powdered pigment, applied repeatedly on to alternating layers of sprayed on dammar varnish. In contrast Vary uses thin liquid oil glazes that dribble over the sides and which sometimes are mixed with smeared or daubed thick paint. She prefers a glossy surface with a full range of chroma and tone, often using metallic and fluorescent paint as well. He likes matt velvety monochromes: in this show, subtly varying blacks or greens. Her sides are just as important as the fronts, whereas he paints only the occasional narrow strip of the side-angled, laminated strata.

The details of their painting placements are such that Umberg occupies the centre of the long wall opposite the gallery entrance, with Vary having an unusual projecting tray-like work positioned near the righthand corner. She also occupies the two shorter end walls of the huge gallery while on the new moveable partition bisecting the gallery space, he has one side and she the other.

As you'd expect the dialogue between these two painters incorporates various lines of sight, sideways viewing of the wall reliefs, and overall vistas – as well as of course, close ups. Some of her dark planes at a distance could be muddled with his, and sometimes she has made fake Umberg bevelled panels. While he never touches block forms, she occasionally paints on little angular chunks with dark colours, and spikey angular slabs with pastel hues. She also likes to cut into the sides of thick rectangles and remove geometric shapes.

Umberg and Vary here have created an intriguing and whimsical hanging arrangement that is fun to explore. It is a visually rich and intelligent exhibition you could spend a lot of time with, moving around the five walls and zeroing in on the paintings from unusual angles. For a Jensen experience, with the new wall, it forces you to be quite mobile. One of their best.

Jensen group show

Kelly Knoebel Roeth Bambury Innes Judd
Jensen
4 February - 6 March 2010

In the big downstairs space this six person show of regular Jensen artists, has mixed in some surprises - including some spectacular works on paper by legends Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd. The work as a collective body of geometric abstraction coheres well, though varying in its use of painted materials, the key chromatic (and dramatic) component in many items being a vibrant orange.

The 2 row 10 unit woodcut by Judd sets the tone. Typically it is permutations on a theme, with a five variation outer frame lined up on top and its removed rectangular centre positioned below. Both types of woodgrained orange shape, framed but not under glass, are traversed by single or double horizontal and vertical lines - the logic being tight, all possibilities intact.

Callum Innes has two wonderful ‘additive-subtractive’ paintings where orange and black oil paint has been applied (along with various other colours underneath) with sweeping horizontal arm movements, and then the righthand half of each vertically hung canvas slowly removed via the vertical application of turps. The process is very evident from the coloured stains and rivulets on the stretcher sides, and the ghostly smudges and scrubbed blurs on the canvas proper.

The only New Zealander here is Stephen Bambury. His single rectangular painting is related to pitted panels in his recent Jensen solo show. Here overlapping matt blue-grey and white-glazed black oblongs create a tension with a shiny black section in the centre, while two adjacent orange rectangles glow on the top left and bottom right corners.

The layers of thin white washes on the top right black rectangle have dark blurry edges and are comparatively abandoned, loose even (they could almost be sprayed) – with a very faint orange horizontal streak peeking through underneath near the top. This makes the work devoid of the tightly interlocking (and – I think - much superior) structure apparent in other similar, more recent works.

On the large wall by the office are two panels, one blood orange, the other soft Prussian blue, by Winton Roeth that are arranged one above (but not touching) the other. They are affected by gold lines bordering their outer edges, for the metallic colour is comparatively unstable – deepening and paling as you move past; disturbing their perimeters – unlike the intransigent velvety, paired oblongs enclosed within.

Imi Knoebel’s six sets of overlapping, paint-brushed, paper sheets play off qualities of hue and Albers’ Law of Simultaneous Contrast against directional striations caused by brush bristles agitating the wet painted surface. The striations within both the large and small sheets of each pair vertically descend above one stroke that horizontally traverses along the lower edge.

Each pair is positioned so their bottom edges are flush, and their optical qualities are difficult to determine - ie. is the colour the result of careful mixing by the artist, or the result of a very considered choice of painted background? Is the colour we perceive actually on the paper or in our brain? The large sheets alternate in their tonal qualities, also exploring nuances of chromatic temperature. They and their companions are under glass, and within stainless steel, welded burnished frames.

Ellsworth Kelly’s works from the mid–seventies provide the deliciously vibrant and eloquent flat shapes he is known for. One is a screenprint, the other a lithograph. The latter is a horizontal curve over two metres long. There is barely detectable embossed, straight edge above it that seems to enclose the hill-like form as if in a delicate, flat box.

This is a good introduction to the overseas artists in this show. The Kelly, Judd, and Knoebel paper works are particularly unusual.

(As in order of discussion, the images are by Judd, Innes, Bambury, Roeth, Knoebel and Kelly.)

Bambury at Jensen

Stephen Bambury: the painting is at the wall
Jensen
14 October - 18 December 2009

Most Auckland gallery goers probably won’t be particularly surprised if I tell them that right now on the walls of the large downstairs space at Jensen, under natural light, are seven carefully positioned Bambury paintings, and while three others of paint and wax on stone tiles are also present in a flat vitrine, the seven panelled works make up an unusually absorbing installation. Jensen Gallery often has spare, somewhat austere, elegant hangs.

However it is not just the exactitude of their positioning within the architecture, and the way these works fit around the various wall lengths, staircases and adjacent corridors that is noteworthy. The paintings are of three compositional types: some have centrally located holes or accentuated corners made from when two diagonally opposite rectangles overlap on a single panel; others have thin, ‘sliding’ crosses placed over an accentuated middle on double panels; one other has a dominantly dark rusty half-panel – made from micaceous iron oxide and with cross lines of iron filings.

So standing in the centre of the very large space, and looking at the sequence in clockwise order, the types go: corner, middle, half, middle, corner, middle, corner. It’s a stuttering but persistent, irregular pulse. Made from elements that really vary - especially in the weight and positioning of the corners, or the positioning of the intersecting cross lines - despite their being classifiable into generic types.

Bambury has been making diptyches with spindly double crosses for many years now, and some of them don’t do much in terms of dynamic. However in this show, on the wall closest to the entrance door, the work called SC099151 is quite extraordinary. It generates its excitement through its two creamy panels not having flushed edges at the top and bottom but being raised higher on the right. For despite these incongruous jumps where they butt together, the central red square and its two crosses (the underlaid solid version and its negative overlaid ‘shadow’) remain perfectly in sync. The affect from this taut interlocking tension is remarkable.

Upstairs he attempts another sort of installation using a long burnt sienna brick wall and a line of six butted pairs of painted stretchers, aligned at diagonal angles. Within each pair, the top stretcher is slightly wider than the one below, the lopsided counterweight flicking a hint of centrifugal spin into the composition. The joined pairs alternate between same colours or contrasting ones - using red, white, and black – and are grouped in three sets of two, aligned to top left, top right and then top left again. Like this.

My feeling that is the angle of alignment is too steep to fully integrate the six doubles, and that the two angles of alignment might work better if they were closer to the vertical.

The downstairs installation is worth spending some serious time with. Of the three types, the paintings with holes, overlapping rectangles and pronounced corners aren’t as successful individually as the others, though their odd lack of balance and avoidance of delicate form or line makes them adventurous planar experiments. Worth visiting for SC099151 alone.

Chromatic toxic syrup

Leigh Martin
Jensen Gallery
25 August - 2 October 2009

If you can imagine a Jules Olitski painting immersed in a vat of intensely saturated dye, or parts of the Shroud of Turin dropped into a viscous Dale Frank, then you get a little closer to experiencing the qualities of these Leigh Martin paintings - made out of super glossy yacht hull resin.

Through the six glistening surfaces of Martin’s six ultra-chromatic, variously sized works you can detect wispy strands of fog at the edges, gently glowing bleached auras in the middle, plus the odd vertical streaky brush line or murky group of dots. Examining them is a bit like going deep sea diving – in a sea of acid yellow, purply red or vivid lolly green. It is all very very still.

The big yellow ones you really feel you could step into, but some of the smaller works have a compacted but subtle density. As well as looking through their centres, you engage with their sides (lots of waxy encrusted drips round the back of the stretcher) and gently darker edges.

While these paintings look as if made from layers of very thin syrup at a confectionary factory there is a sense of toxic bloom (like poisonous algae) as well. Something slightly hideous that you can’t quite put your finger on, that beckons you closer – but which warns you to be cautious, despite its optical allure.

Works on paper

Group show: C6H10O5 4
Jensen
June 9 – 21 July 2009

This works on paper show has a dozen artists participating and thirty-one items on display. Not all the works are purchasable: two (a Nauman drypoint and a Ryman aquatint) being on loan from private collections. Some of the works, like that of Ellsworth Kelly or Alex Katz, you rarely see in this country.

It is a good looking hang, with strategically positioned grids of prints arrayed amongst the rows of single items on the three mdf walls of the large downstairs space – and punctuated by the occasional lusciously painted block sculpture (on solid cardboard) by Elizabeth Vary.

Almost all of the work here is about tactility of surface; sensual qualities of thinly layered coloured paint or ink within rectangles, parallelograms or line. Two intriguing works by Winston Roeth of concentric circles are between Kenneth Noland and Ugo Rondinone in his use of that form. Impeccably spaced lines (dry tempera in one, soft fluffy pastel on coloured field in another) create their own internal tensions, but are not too big. They are intimate works that draw you in close to study the edges of their taut curved lines.

Taut but organic lines figure prominently in the suite of six 1993 Brice Marden etchings and aquatints (Han Shan Exit), a silvery grey homage to Pollock but even better. They feature a crisp thin wobbly line that is deceptively precise, used to create a superbly dramatic calligraphy that seems loosely wrapped around the human figure.

Callum Innes’s watercolours are like pages in an open book: transluscent layers of thin rectangular colour separately applied side by side and then over both. The dried watercolour pigment has left mottled ripples like those on the surface of a pool, but much much finer, with a delicate slightly cloudy chroma.

A drier stickier sort of surface, less liquid, is found in the aluminium and acrylic works by Stephen Bambury. They are of silver horizontal and vertical rectangles positioned at right angles to each other over a black square. Bambury inventively aligns the silver panels at different angles and alters the proportions of the black corners peeking through the intersecting edges. The surface quality of the silver paint has finely lined striations and smears, not so much scraped as direct application.

This is a good exhibition at Jensen - though perhaps it could have been more adventurous. It is very surface dominant, about seduction of the eye. One wonders about some of the non-painting artists this gallery shows like James Casebere and Tony Oursler and if they ever do preparatory drawings, and if so, on paper other than Arches. A scribbled text can be a drawing, and a brilliant writer like Oursler must make notes, and Casebere makes 3D models that surely he plans. The current display is a bit too much about finished product, whereas the rough and ready, more unpredictable processes of art thinking are immensely interesting too.

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.

Social shift

Jude Rae
Jensen
10 March – 17 April 2009

Jude Rae is well known for her various painting projects over the years since she began in the early nineties, from dramatically twisted sheets and superimposed texts, to innovative industrial still lifes using gas cylinders and fire extinguishers, and ambiguous crumpled sheets that suggestively teased between what they might be covering and what may have laid on top of them.

In recent years she has become much more interested in architectural space, and even her small Morandi influenced still lifes have reflected that. She once worked in black, white and chromatically nuanced greys but now even her still lifes have an Impressionist feel. The object surfaces and forms are very solid, but the chromatic flicks on their ‘skins’ pulse and shimmer. The light is on surfaces, and not say in the air. There is no atmospheric dematerialization. Closer to Chardin in essence than Monet.

There are five works in the big downstairs Jensen gallery. One is a receding dark corridor inside a Parisian block of flats with light glowing from a window on a distant landing. The blue black shadows are dramatic and propel you to rush forward. Two other works are based on T5 at Heathrow and tease out spatial contradictions apparent upon and behind a dominant glass window, and before it, receding and reflective tiled floors. The rusty horizontal rectangles and umber vertical beams seem to float, serving as foils to the thin diagonal floor lines.

The smaller of the T5 works features distant silhouetted people against the window-gridded sunlight. Its ‘human’ content links it to the key work in the exhibition, a painting based on a newspaper photograph of a group of bystanders in Lebanon watching the Israeli bombing of Beirut in 2006.

The work has an ambiguous image of billowing smoke and a distant flash on the distant horizon – a parallel of images of the testing of the very first Atomic bomb – and the rectangular surface is covered with delicate trickles of thin blue and orange paint that discretely optically activate it. The sense of drama achieved by using a historical narrative is a new area for Rae, one that moves away from her usual contemplative spatial preoccupations towards active commentary. A shift from quietistic murmurings to that of being more actively vocal. An interest in the social manifest in paint.

Considering 'considering...'

Stephen Bambury: Considering Wittgenstein
Jensen
12 November – 20 December 2008

That sneery expression “Stupid as a Painter” that Duchamp and his pals used to laugh about, is it still creating an excessive over-reaction from some painters? Well from the above exhibition title it appears so. After all, how does Bambury do his ‘considering’? Does he write philosophical treatises tying Wittgenstein’s ideas in with his studio practice? Perhaps he works with a copy of Philosophical Investigations in one hand and a paint roller in the other? Why the pompous vague title that he has made no effort to justify?

Now if we were to take this artist on in his own game, we could point out that the American philosopher Donald Davidson once wrote this:

How many facts or propositions are conveyed by a photograph? None, an infinity, or one great unstatable fact? Bad question. A picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture. (1.)

So paintings are the wrong currency to exchange for words. One Bambury title in this show does in fact quote a clause from Wittgenstein about ‘conditional denotation of the properties of material’, but even if it were the ‘right’ currency, it is out of context and incomplete. Yet despite all this, if we disregard the title, Bambury’s paintings themselves are in this particular exhibition, a treat.

It’s a large show, found on both Jensen’s top and ground floors, one that is refreshingly varied and sensitively hung. There is a wall sculpture (gold leafed house), some digital prints, a set of 10 screenprints, a C-type photograph, some sensual paintings on aluminium featuring Bambury’s well known cross motifs, a selection of diptychs with connected L-shaped motifs, and other cross works exploring reflecting, tilted quadrilaterals placed over subtly raised corner squares.

Judging from this selection, Bambury seems lately to have been exploring more unusual chromatic combinations within his cross format. More interestingly, he also has been making paint from rusted iron filings (maybe a development from the Six Degrees of Separation show and also his Lumley tower oxidised copper panel mural) – something akin to Pauline Rhodes’ work of the eighties, but more about manual application of filings as ‘pigment’ than processes of oxidized staining used for activating space.

These rusted cross works have delicately modulated, rivulet–strewn surfaces, mottled winding trickles compressed within a densely patterned, auburn-sienna plus sign. They have an industrial feel, rich in associations with weather and agrarian architecture, and without the ceramic-like glazes of some earlier works from the late eighties.

Other works emphasize pitted, pock marks, flat cratered holes formed by burst bubbles and stretching, shifting planes of drying paint. Some have coloured trapezoid shapes that exert strange pressures on the square aluminium support edges; a few feature highly reflective glossy, quadrilateral forms; others still utilise subtly intertwined, butted in unison, spindly crosses.

This is the best show Bambury has had for some time. The two floors are quite different in mood – with more intimacy upstairs. Nicely hung and well worth a visit.


(1.) From Davidson's What Metaphors Mean, found in 'On Metaphor' ed. Sheldon Sacks, Chicago U.P.,1979, p.45