(Hocken Collections Gallery)
Rita Angus was undoubtedly one of New Zealand’s finest 20th century artists. During a 40-year career, she became well regarded for her compressed land and townscapes, and her stylised modernist portraits.
The Hocken is the latest stop on a nationwide tour of Angus’ work, giving us a opportunity to see her paintings. Focus is primarily on portraits. The flat, angular surfaces draw connections with other modernist portraitists of the era, perhaps most clearly Poland’s Tamara de Lempicka, though Angus’ style was clearly her own creation.
The exhibition is well represented by images of friends and social milieu, and is crowned by several of her best-known self-portraits, notably the icon-like Rutu.
Other works include several sketches and still-lifes, though surprisingly few of her landscapes. Some of the artist’s more surreal, allegorical images are also on show, including several showing the destruction of a Wellington graveyard to make way for a motorway.
The influence of fellow members of Christchurch’s The Group are evident in these pieces, and there are also ties to metaphysical art. These works show Angus’ strong belief in preservation of urban landscapes.
The exhibition is bookended by several works by Angus’ The Group contemporaries, and by a Zen-like meditative video of the artists’ landscape work.
(Milford Gallery)
The art of Israel Tangaroa Birch inhabits a realm between the solid and the aethereal.
His paintings, which could equally qualify as two-dimensional sculptures, create illusory spaces with their highly burnished and lacquered surfaces. The mirror-like sheen seems to capture profound depths of flame or water, horizontal abysses of light.
The subjects of the works also lie between two realms, those of the physical and the spiritual. Within the shining curves, words and traditional Māori forms emerge. The pieces are filled with mauri, their own life force dominating the walls of the gallery. Simultaneously, they are more secular messages, several of them with coincidental topical relevance at this time of nationwide protest. The pieces are, however, unifying rather than divisive, with a distinct feeling of kotahitanga arising from the work.
The artist has been steeped in the traditions of Māori art from a young age, and his work beautifully captures a point of contact between whakairo and a more industrial approach to art. The works glisten and move, changing appearance and colour as the viewer moves around them, becoming jewels of toned light. It is perhaps fitting that the artist now uses his full name, with its acknowledgement of the god of the sea, as these works shimmer and change like ripples on the surface of water.
(Bellamys Gallery)
Flame and water also make appearances in a group show currently on display at Bellamys Gallery.
The majority of the works are by the two gallery regulars, Pauline Bellamy and Manu Berry, with additional pieces by Gary Pickford and poetry by Cassie Ringland-Stewart. Berry, in a series of fine woodcut prints, uses deep browns and greens to present a series of images of native trees, trees which have long been used to produce fire, either through the use of the wood or through the natural oils they contain. Two more stylised images, displaying rich, repeated patterns of flame, add strong flashes of colour to the display.
Bellamy’s oil paintings are more naturalistic yet created with strong painterly strokes. These pieces depict the tangle of trees in native bush and occasional cameos of bright blooms, as seen by walkers on the tramping routes which give titles to several of the pieces.
Pickford’s three works are small mixed media pieces, lying between abstract and landscape. Vague forms of moss green and earth brown give attractive intimations of landforms. Alongside these works, Ringland-Stewart presents a short cycle of poems reflecting on changes to the land caused by humans and by the increasingly troubling climate. The overall feeling of the exhibition is of a tinderbox nature at the point of rebellion.
By James Dignan
