Art Seen: March 09

In this week's Art Seen, Robyn Maree Pickens looks at exhibitions from Milford Galleries and the Brett McDoweill Gallery.

Pistol and Kotiate (2013), by Martin Selman.

‘‘Selected Works’’ (Milford Galleries)

With 29 works on display, ''Selected Works'' offers a feast for the eyes. For frequent visitors to the gallery, this exhibition provides an opportunity to revisit a selection of the gallery's holdings, and for those new to Milford ''Selected Works'' offers a representative sample of work by the gallery's stable of artists.

This stable includes some of New Zealand's senior artists: sculptor Neil Dawson, painters Dick Frizzell, Joanna Braithwaite and Ian Scott, and Ann Robinson - whose cast glass Neodymium Bowl (1996) changes colour under fluorescent light. Younger artists working in diverse media such as Richard Orjis (photography) and Reuben Patterson (glitter on canvas) are also included.

With such a generous array of works on display, this exhibition offers many opportunities for appreciating new relationships between works not generally exhibited together, and for apprehending the ways in which works speak to each other across artistic practices, era, and media.

Although positioned some distance apart, the formal shape of Katherine Smyth's ceramics Long Popadum Vase (2014) and Pod (2006) seem to be conversing with an early Michael Shepherd work from 1978 titled Large White Collar and Tie.

In Shepherd's work a disembodied collar and tie has become a sculptural object in a pale and nebulous landscape. The tie itself appears magnetised out beyond the picture plane as if to lure the viewer.

Untitled (blue) (2017), by Martin Thompson

‘‘Eight Works’’, Martin Thompson (Brett McDowell Gallery)

In what is now an established tradition, Brett McDowell opens each February with an exhibition by Martin Thompson. This year was no exception.

In the intervening period since last year's exhibition, Thompson has produced several new diptychs that are currently on display alongside two early works from the mid-1990s.

Like many artists, Thompson has found his niche and stuck with it. He creates mind-bending kaleidoscopic masterpieces of rippling geometric precision with fine ink pens on prepared paper that resembles graph paper.

His unit is still the 1mm square of graph paper which he colours in square by square to create patterns that evoke an uncommon mathematical facility, and rich aesthetic pleasure.

The inclusion of the two early drawings alongside recent works enables the defining characteristics of Thompson's practice to be apprehended.

There is the familiar graph paper (now prepared to the artist's scale preferences), the diptych format, the 1mm unit, monotone palette, and unique patterning: no two works are the same. Aside from scale and colour, Thompson's works can be categorised compositionally, with some patterns appearing centripetal, others horizontally stacked according to pattern bands, and a constellation type of composition that has its own ''night sky'' order. Each drawing in the diptych is conceived by the artist as ''positive'' and ''negative'', that together make a whole.

Mures Moil (2017), by Hannah Beehre

‘‘Show & Tell’’ (Milford Galleries)

''Show & Tell'' brings together a diverse group of seven contemporary New Zealand artists whose collective practices include painting, ceramics, sculpture, cast glass and print-making.

This broad diversity of artists and media makes for unexpected yet productive juxtapositions that are variously formal or thematic. In the case of Paul Maseyk's ceramics and Darryn George's abstract paintings it is the formal qualities of composition and line that enable the viewer to create visual relationships between Maseyk's large, geometrically patterned ceramic vessels and the central spine of George's canvases.

In the company of established artists such as Darryn George and mid-career artist Hannah Beehre, this exhibition introduces to a Dunedin audience the work of recent Ilam graduate Aiko Robinson, who is garnering attention for both the finesse of her drawing (lithographic prints), and her reinterpretation of Japanese shunga (tradition of woodblock prints devoted to erotic subjects).

Due to the erotic content, Robinson's prints are exhibited in a separate gallery space that also includes a suite of Maseyk's colourful, striped phallic ceramic works. It is this pairing that most directly exemplifies the exhibition's theme of show and tell.

This theme is also subtly present in Michael Hight's night paintings on land expropriation, Peter Trevelyan's exquisite miniature graphite sculptures housed inside hollowed out books, and in Hannah Beehre's ink and charcoal drawings on canvas.