Throughout the 20th century, New Zealand artists were consistently interested in the concept of national identity: the idea of a unique New Zealand culture and a language by which to express it. This was the goal at the heart of emerging and often controversial modernism. Painters struggled to balance the desire for a distinctly local art movement with the compulsion to keep up with trends from abroad.
The focus of the identity search was the land itself, the scenery, colour palette and patterns of light belonging to this country alone. Landscapes were the subject of choice and the current exhibition at the Hocken Collections charts a journey from Nicholas Chevalier's View looking north from Mt. Iron, Wanaka (1866) to Graham Fletcher's Untitled (Sugar Loaf Waka) (2013).
More than a century of geographical and stylistic change is presented, from the European influence of the early settlers through the two-dimensional deconstructions of the abstract artists to the advances in modern technology. The works of game-changing art teachers such as W.H. Allen and R.N. Field hang near those of their famous students: Doris Lusk, M.T. (''Toss'') Woollaston and Colin McCahon, to name a few. Dunedin has one of the country's finest collections of New Zealand art at the Hocken and it is always a pleasure when a survey exhibition brings a wide sample of those treasures out into the public eye.
The high standard of group exhibitions continues in Central Otago, with the 15 artists of Cromwell's Hullabaloo Art Space combining their talents for a collective show at Central Stories, in Alexandra. The 70 works are linked by the professional bond of their creators rather than by any common theme, but there is a sense of exuberance and honest joy in the creative process that follows from one piece to the next. The diversity of subject and medium makes for an absorbing display, with each visitor to the gallery likely to gravitate towards their own favourites according to individual taste, but all of the artists are worthy of attention.
Painter Rachel Hirabayashi's distinctive style is always a standout when she exhibits and her Under the Lake and Rural Worship are two of the most compelling works. Gail de Jong and Nigel Wilson also impress in the landscape genre with the former's highly textural Hawksburn Sunset and the latter's atmospheric The Clutha from Alex bridge.
Marion Vialade provides a touch of appealing whimsy with her Square Cat series and Ro Bradshaw's Snowflight transforms a discarded placemat into a bleakly beautiful window on winter, capturing the merest glimpse of a bird in isolated flight. Andi Regan's mixed media Delta II and Alluvium I are rather like portholes into mystical waters, while Odelle Morshuis' portfolio of work is fascinating, recording the constant movements of her subjects over time.
Louise Greig is a largely self-taught artist whose talent for portraiture approaches that of the Old Masters she so reveres. Particularly fascinated by 17th-century Dutch and Flemish portraits, she wanted to ''recreate the same sense of wholeness and mystery in the person. That sense of their eyes being portals''. It is those eyes that dominate her exhibition ''The Cassandra Complex'', a series of realistic portraits modelled by the artist's daughter, their painted gazes so luminously compelling that it is a genuine effort to look away. Her talent with surface textures, be it skin, bone or fabric, is such that one could expect to reach out and encounter smooth warmth and movement rather than flat oil and linen.
The influence of works such as Johannes Vermeer's famous Girl with a Pearl Earring is immediately obvious in pieces like Portrait of a Young Girl and a Black Hole (2013), but throughout the entirety of the show, Greig has managed to capture something of the intimacy and sincerity of Rembrandt's A Girl at a Window and the court portraits of Flemish Baroque painter Anthony van Dyck, among others. The Cassandra Complex (2013) features a painted skull clutched in the subject's hands, a skeletal theme that is repeated in equally adept still life canvases like Lily White (2013) and was a fairly common if slightly macabre preoccupation with early European artists.
- Laura Elliot
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