In this week's Art Seen, James Dignan looks at exhibitions from Hockens Collection Gallery, Inge Doesburg, and Angel Burns.
The Wake (1958), Panel VI, by Colin McCahon.
"Freefall" (Hocken Collections Gallery)
Words are a powerful force literally, evocatively, and esoterically. They provide us with meaning, identity, and force of argument. Their strength can be multiplied when conjoined with art. In a major exhibition at the Hocken, the powerful combination of word and art is ably shown.
The exhibition is divided across the gallery's three rooms, the smaller end rooms presenting secular and religious works respectively. In the ''secular room'', portraits of poets sit alongside the use of art as a popular medium in the form of musical band posters. The opposing room allows for a juxtaposition of European medieval and renaissance religious works with 20th-century works by New Zealand masters such as Jeffrey Harris and Colin McCahon.
The central room becomes a point for these two factors and facets of our history to form dialogues. Here, a series of glass cases contain fascinating artefacts from our country's history. In many of these, image and word come together; in others, notably lawyer Alfred Hanlon's case notes on the Minnie Deans trial, the power of words alone is presented in poignant detail. Surrounding these pieces are large artistic works, notably by McCahon and Ralph Hotere, which reflect on the written word and literally draw the line between text and image.
Tree, by Inge Doesburg
"Photographs & Paintings", Inge Doesburg (The Artist’s Room)
One of the most remarkable features of Inge Doesburg's art is that, despite working in a number of media (and producing excellent works in them all), there is a beautiful uniformity of style. Whether the artist is presenting paintings, photographs or prints, her work is instantly recognisable.
In her current exhibition at The Artist's Room, this consistent excellence is well displayed in a series of moody, at times almost Gothic, paintings and photographs. Inspired by a recent residency in the deep South and time on Stewart Island, the works become a journal of travel. The use of the oval frame, with its connotations of early photographs and Victoriana becomes a metaphorical vessel, both for the images, and as a representation of sea travel.
Many of the photographs are deliberately presented as if they are vintage works, and they are often deliberately blurred to present a world of tone and shadow, rather than a pinpoint location. Both they and the paintings are made unsettling by the slanting of horizons: we are seeing images from aboard a ship in a stormy sea, not from solid land.
What the images lack in detail and colour (many are monochrome or very muted in tone) they make up for many times over in their sheer strength. These are powerful, evocative works.
Ocean Swell, by Angela Burns
"On Reflection", Angela Burns (Gallery De Novo)
Like Doesburg's work, Angel Burns' paintings rely heavily on a sense of atmosphere to provide impressions, often little more than hints, of the landscape. Her strong paintings are exercises in tonality, at first glance often seeming merely like abstract strata of earthy colours.
While the works can easily be read this way (and, indeed, it does not detract from their attractiveness), it only tells half the story. Step back from the paintings, and forms start to appear. We see the distant folds of land and the churning movement of waves and stormy sky.
The artist has applied paint in bold strokes and elemental blocks. Detail is often deliberately omitted, replaced by broad, impressionistic gestural sweeps. Images such as Big Sky Towards Middlemarch and Up From Sutton, Strath Taieri present wide vistas, the blurring of the land akin to seeing the world pass by through the windows of a moving vehicle.
The resulting paintings become, in the artist's own words, ''a diary of work'' capturing the land of coastal Otago and Maniototo. Unlike Doesburg's often dark and sombre images, here the colour has the strong earthy warmth of a dry summer, and the viewer can almost sense the scent and sound of the land in these pieces.
