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.

Inside this world: the limits of faith

Out of this world
Curated by Leonard Emmerling and Stephen Bambury
St. Paul St Gallery
17 September – 16 October 2009


The title of this international exhibition Out of this world refers to the well known, 1888 anonymous line engraving (made from a wood block) of a pilgrim poking his head through the bubblelike membrane that encloses the natural world , the enclosing sphere made of scientific explanation, in order to see the divine and inexplicable forces in action beyond. The experience of encountering the incomprehensible, a magnitude so vast we cannot grasp it, what we also call ‘the Sublime’, is the theme here.

The show examines artists’ attempts to capture this – some sincere, others humorous – and whether it can be upheld as proof of a Supreme Being. It also introduces unjustified belief, the notion of ‘leaps of faith’, dividing the artists into two camps: believers and sceptics.

Actually McCahon is the only ‘believer’ here, apart from the anonymous wood engraver, and the only New Zealander. What that suggests I’m not sure. Certainly that such mystics are outnumbered, particularly in today's art world - judging by this exhibition. However it is a great McCahon work, with impeccably handled dry paint on jute, showing the comet Kohoutek streaking across the sky in three separate, butted together, charcoal coloured hangings. The word ‘Jump’ on the far left declares McCahon's risky faith. It seems to mean let your imagination leap across the void of common sense to grasp the significance of this wondrous event. Like the kneeling man in the wood engraving, ignore the world of logic.

The prints by Vija Celmins of night skies or expanses of ocean come closest to McCahon in terms of an intimate sized work that confronts the viewer with enormity. These small works draw you in close but they could be pro-Mystic or pro-Science. The two viewpoints are not necessarily in opposition.

One artwork that implies that it is the viewer alone who is generating any mystical being ‘out there’ is the hologram by James Turrell. It alters its soft, vivid green, rectangular shape as you approach or move around it, depending on your bodily relationship to its glass slab and the illuminating spotlight.

Another particularly gorgeous work connected to the body is a deep velvety black, horizontal rectangle by Peter Rösel. He has lightly flicked specks of white toothpaste over it from a toothbrush. In this way the painting becomes an open mouth, implying God has an oral orifice and is a human creation that mimics ourselves.

Thomas Ruff plays a similar sort of game with his enormous glossy photograph of a night sky, where he states he is prone to adding one extra hand-painted star. Unlike Rösel where God imitates people, Ruff imitates God, yet giving him the human attribute of mischievousness.

Ben Rivers has a grainy five minute film of snippets made with a hand-held camera showing lines of pilgrims apparently ascending the Irish volcanic hill of Station Island on Lough Derg where St. Patrick lived. The added soundtrack plays the noise of incessantly trampled scoria, yet Catholic pilgrims are meant to go barefooted around certain shrines on the way. This hints that perhaps that the film is faked. The Purgatory pilgrims in this film keep their boots securely fastened.

Such fakery is further explored in Linda Quinlan’s two channel film of her version of McNaught's comet seen two years ago over Tasmania. Her film is a double exposure that seems to include a Milky Way of oil droplets floating on water. The main image is based on a lamp placed in a forest with a cloth thrown over it that has a circular hole cut in. This creates a diagonal beam of light amenable to being crossed by dust clouds. In the background stars are formed from the surrounding, reflecting, glossy leaves.

Modernist art history and the so-called Death of Painting is laughed at by Jorge Molder through his film of what seems to be Malevich’s famous 1913 Suprematist work, Black Square. This ‘full void’ that established a ‘supremacy of pure feeling’ representing God (‘I search for God. I search within myself for myself’) is lampooned when it becomes a trapdoor in a ceiling that opens so that a besuited gentleman can then escape.

The fleeing gent could be a Suprematist painter or he could be God. He could be a modern version of the observer poking his head through the firmament, reversing, pulling his head back out and coming down to earth. This is a wonderful, exceptionally cohesive, exhibition that is witty and light, yet absorbing in the way it counters the position of say, Natasha Conland’s Mystic Truths of two years ago, in relation to ‘outer-worldly’ states of mind. An important show to see.

Images from top to bottom: anonymous, Colin McCahon, Vija Celmins, James Turrell, Ben Rivers, and Linda Quinlan.

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.

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