This week, James Dignan takes a look at works by Fiona Connor, Edward Povey, and Robert West.
A private collection is, by definition, subjective, shaped by the collector's tastes and inspiration. If the collector is lucky enough to be able to amass a major body of art they can rival the reservoir of works of a public gallery and still maintain a style and scope particular to their own preferences.
Jim and Mary Barr are among New Zealand's foremost patrons of modern conceptual art. Thankfully for Dunedin, their long-standing relationship with the city's public gallery allows us to view excerpts from their collection. The current exhibition is an opportunity to see some of their newer acquisitions, among them pieces representing many of New Zealand's more important contemporary artists.
These works are integral to the Barrs' living environment; here, however, they are removed from that intrinsic surround, and we view the works as individual items. Though many of the pieces are ‘‘difficult'', many are also of great strength, ranging from exquisite small works such as Oscar Enberg's bread-like carving and Kate Newby's amorphous glasswork to major structural pieces such as Fiona Connor's polystyrene stairway.
The display is eclectic and fascinating, and a revealing look at current New Zealand modern art, and also at the private world of a major collection.
St Clair's leafy Sandringham St is the unlikely site of one of Dunedin's newest and more interesting galleries. Fe29 (named for the metallic element Iron), situated in the renovated villa of its directors, is exhibiting the first New Zealand display by major Welsh artist Edward Povey.
The exhibition is something of an overview of Povey's career, featuring photographs of his murals from the 1970s, several oil paintings, some astonishing printed works, and a series of more recent gestural, semi-abstract portraits in a style the artist refers to as ‘‘invaded figuration''.
The portrait works feature figures emerging from abstract backgrounds, the edges of the human form and the blocks and slashes of the surround shifting and merging to create a dynamic relationship between the two. The works are of a large scale, and as such this interplay dominates any space in which the paintings are located.
The printed works, often overlaid with chalk and other materials, are marvellously subtle pieces. At first sight, images such as Patriots, created at London's famous Curwen Studio, appear to be paintings rather than the painstakingly created lithographs that they actually are, as do the classically inspired, fresco-like images of the mixed media Terra Cotta Prints.
Robert West's latest exhibition at the Moray Gallery is a combination of older and newer paintings. In this display he has largely eschewed the sombre colours with which his work in recent years has become associated, and also done away with the stitched and wired lines of connection and communication, which have frequently turned his paintings into mixed-media works.
Here, those lines have been replaced with painted grids; the exhibition's title, though ostensibly attached just to a small feature of one piece in the display, can be interpreted to also indicate the white patterns which form an amorphous grid between the blocks of many of the artist's newer paintings, suggestive in their own way of the more rigid black delineations in the work of the modern Dutch master.
West's usual dark colours have been swept away by cheerful strong greens and pastel blues and pinks - as the artist puts it ‘‘Mediterranean colours''. Though still abstract, many of the works make reference to landscape in their titles, and the block-like areas of colour have a strong topographical feel.
In some ways, these pieces suggest the bright painted land and city forms of another of the Moray's regular artists, John Z. Robinson; it would be interesting to see the two painters' works side by side.
-By James Dignan
