Hero artist hands over the reins
A new exhibition looks back at four decades of abstract artist Stephen Bambury’s work, writes Warren Feeney.
For the first time in his 40-year exhibition history in Aotearoa, the US and Europe, minimalist abstract painter Stephen Bambury has conceded the task of selecting works for a new exhibition to a gallery director.
We Can Be Heroes was curated by the Nadene Milne Gallery, after Milne visited Bambury’s Auckland studio last December. He recalls she came across a huge work in storage from 1986, titled The West Coast Painting.
‘‘She said, ‘What’s this?’, and started to rip some plastic off and I said, ‘You can’t do that. Don’t look at that!’ She ripped it off and said; ‘I want to show this’.
‘‘Nadene followed her direction and it has been challenging, but I have loved it. It has allowed me to see these things in such a fresh way.’’
We Can Be Heroes consists of two parts; a series of paintings from the late 1970s to 80s, representing Bambury’s arts practice after his graduation from Elam School of Fine Arts, and paintings, prints and sculptural objects from 2000 to 2017.
All are abstract, geometric minimalist works that explore formal relationships between line, space, tonality, colour, materials, mass and volume, acknowledging a history of abstraction in works that insist on our direct engagement and response.
Yet, clarifying the certainties and consistencies in Bambury’s art falls short of acknowledging the dualities and questions that it also encompasses and wishes to acquaint us with. There is a necessary deception to these paintings and Bambury seems thoughtfully conscious of it as well in discussing his work and its history.
‘‘I have always maintained that I have only had one idea and that is fundamentally ontological. I have been tracking down the same path again and again and again and by doing that I can point out the similarities and the differences.’’
Square Painting (Shaped) (1984) comes from a period in which contemporary painting was frequently confronted by the question; ‘‘is painting dead?’’ Like many of the works in We Can Be Heroes it is visually deceptive.
It physically extends out from the gallery walls, encroaching into the space and disrupting the evenly measured gap between wall and object.
Neither is this framed canvas squared, with one side wider than it’s opposite on the other side. Square Painting (Shaped) may seem to be sitting square and flat to the wall, but in reality, it is not a square painting capable of doing so.
Bambury says that is the point. ‘‘It is a contradiction in terms; that contradiction is also in the idea of painting itself being outdated or abstraction being outdated.
‘‘That is a square idea, but I am trying to point out that it might not be square at all.
‘‘The paintings are usually loaded. They are kind of like landmines that are waiting to explode.’’
Bambury’s works from the 1980s have their genesis in the decade when post-modernism assumed centre stage, challenging and raising questions about the long-standing claims of European and American modernism and assumptions about the truths of its philosophies. Bambury gave priority to the immediate experience of the painting itself; its colour, shape and form as an ‘‘actualised’’ painting.
‘‘I was looking for another way in which painting could reach towards my interest in minimalism and what might start to constitute a post-minimalist practice.
‘‘Then I come under the weight of feminism, culturalism, postmodernity and I struggled with the notion of why most people in the art world thought that postmodernity painting only pertained to figuration. There was an enormous resurgence in figuration around that period and I set out on a course to explore the notions that I saw as important.’’
Bambury’s exploration of abstraction has also seen his attention as a painter predominantly directed internationally.
‘‘I have always been interested in being a kind of a citizen of the world and when I say that, it does mean that I speak with a certain inclination and that voice is deeply rooted in place and my interest in Ma¯ ori culture and Pakeha culture. It is about pre-war Europe, transatlantic and post-war transpacific. My painting is something about trying to navigate that triangulation.
‘‘Initially, as a younger painter I was directed towards the American post-war tradition, but gradually that turned and I started to push back more into the origins of abstraction. I came to a conclusion that the radicalism of [abstract minimalist] Kasimir Malevich and Suprematism had been shut down prematurely by the shift from Marxism to Stalinism. It was a fire that was put out too soon. I have always had the conviction that the embers were still burning.
‘‘I have never been content with anything that I do, but I have learned to take great pleasure from it and the questions just go on arising out of the work for me, the way I relate that work to the history of painting and civilisation as well.
‘‘I believe totally in the idea that I am ‘audience’ for my work. I am first audience. As Duchamp said of himself, ‘I am fundamentally a lazy man. I have only ever done enough to amuse myself’. When Duchamp says something like that, it is worth considering, because there is often an act of dissemblance within that voice.
‘‘I have found with these paintings from the 1980s, I come out the other side and can still be the artist and still be audience, albeit a privileged audience, but I am looking for that place where I can start to slide back out and take myself out of the work.
‘‘I find myself at a point, particularly because I am between cultures and places I am living now [New Zealand and France], having to reassess and look at a lot of stuff, so for me the exhibition was very timely. Whilst I tried to steer away from that, perhaps I was a little scared to show them – I have thoroughly enjoyed it.’’
❚ Stephen Bambury, We Can Be Heroes, Nadene Milne Gallery,
10 Bath St, 11am to 5pm Tuesdays to Saturdays, until April 4 (although Gallery is closed for Easter, March 30 to April 2).