Art seen

‘‘Painting After All’’, Gerhard Richter.

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)

www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2020/gerhard-richter-painting-aft...

One of the joys of exploring exhibitions online is the chance to see displays by artists that we would not normally have a chance to see locally. Admittedly, there is nothing like seeing work ‘‘in the flesh’’, but in trying times the digital image can suffice.

One notable exhibition well worth a long look is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's ‘‘Painting After All’’, a substantial retrospective of modern German master Gerhard Richter. Richter's work ranges from photorealistic oils on canvas through photographic prints and back to painting, the recent works being largely abstract in nature.

Looking at the works in chronological order, it is easy to see that, despite the precise nature of many of the early painted works, abstraction has always been bubbling somewhere close to the surface. It was clearly a first love of Richter's, and is a style which he has returned to in much of his 21st-Century practice. The boundaries between the realistic and the gestural are fascinating in their clues as to the shifts in the artist's processes and approach.

The exhibition is very thorough in its annotation, and it would be easy to spend hours exploring it. Each of the 100 or more works is accompanied by text, and the whole is supplemented by videos of and about the artist.

‘‘Masterpieces Up Close’’.

(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.)

www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/masterpieces-up-close

Virtual touring also allows us to see great masterpieces in their historic settings, such as works by the Dutch Masters at the Netherlands' Rijksmuseum. ‘‘Masterpieces Up Close’’ is a presentation of the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honour and Great Hall, and includes works by Hals, Vermeer, Van Dyck and Rembrandt, among others.

The paintings are presented as they appear in the gallery and many can also be viewed in detail accompanied by information about the works, presented both as text and as narration. The greatest amount of attention is reserved for the hall's centrepiece, Rembrandt's The Night Watch. This is accompanied by a wealth of intriguing facts relating to the painting's meaning, its history, and some of the mysteries surrounding it, as well as details of the restoration process, which has recently been started.

It would have been nice to have close-up images and information about all the works, but what there is is still a wonderful tour, both for well-known masterworks, and also works by artist's whose names have dimmed in the memory over the centuries, such as the remarkable Threatened Swan, by Jan Asselijn.

‘‘Inside and Out’’.

(Milford Galleries Queenstown.)

www.milfordgalleries.co.nz/queenstown/exhibitions/10648-Inside-and-Out

‘‘Inside and Out’’ is an extensive virtual exhibition, ostensibly at Milford Galleries Queenstown. It contains numerous works divided into several ‘‘walls’’, each of which is based around a central theme.

The titular ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘out’’, in their most literal forms, are represented well by works from the likes of Graham Fletcher and Neil Dawson (inside), and Dick Frizzell and Neil Frazer (outside). However, it is the more metaphoric meanings of the terms which dominate. Themes range from cultural identity to the dichotomy of reality and imagination. Together, the works expand on the theme of the opposites which shape our daily lives: dark and light, waking and dreaming, possible and impossible. Works by Andy Leleisi'uao and Michael Hight display an inner dream language, and the works in Gallery Two (wall one) all deal with the symbolism of the animal, often with the subtext of its representation of our inner primal state.

Many of the central works in the exhibition are by Yuki Kihara and Lisa Reihana, two artists who use the photographic image to constantly address the line walked between tribal past and multicultural present. Kihara's Maui Descending a Staircase II is particularly eye-catching in its reworking of Duchamp's seminal painting.