Ten exhibitions to see right now
emerging appearance of a new Christchurch: ‘‘A look shaped by legislation . . . not a look of privacy . . . the look of formalised and monetised conviviality.’’ Brick Fall Glass Wall is an enquiring and confronting experience.
Julia Holderness’ The Group: home-ware at The National (until August 5) raises questions about the Christchurch-based artists’ collective, The Group (1927–1977) and the invisibility of those artists exhibiting domestic objects such as pottery and weaving in its annual exhibitions. Exhibited alongside paintings by artists like Rita Angus, their work has been ignored to date by the art world and wider public.
Holderness’ interest is in a history about the marginalisation of the applied arts and in The Group: home-ware she creates an alternative Group exhibition of domestic items by artists, real and imagined.
At the Jonathan Smart Gallery, Dick Frizzell exhibits Up the Road (finishing July 30), a series of paintings of the New Zealand landscape that look like a homage to Canterbury regionalism.
Up the Road is well titled, inviting gallery visitors to follow the path in front of them into rural New Zealand, welcomed by the spirit of artists like Archibald Nicoll and Rata Lovell-Smith.
Yet, Up the Road is not really about the local landscape. Rather, it is about Frizzell’s performance as consummate painter and his ability to continue to squeeze credibility and beauty from each and every subject he chooses to paint.
The group exhibition, Last Judgment at PGgallery192 (until August 19) features the work of nine artists invited to respond to a 17th Century engraving based on Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel.
With the engraving also on exhibition, Last Judgement provides an opportunity to review each artist’s response, and what this tells us about their practice.
The interweaving of figures in Michelangelo’s image, as well as the unworldly and chaotic nature of its subject, are only the beginning of a variety of responses to Last Judgement from artists that include Bill Hammond, Philippa Blair, Aiko Robinson, Sam Harrison, Roger Boyce, Darryn George and Marian Maguire.
Shannon Williamson’s Continuous Positive at City Art (until August 26) is a new series of works on paper that conveys the presence of the human body in images as uncomfortable and uneasy as they are beautiful.
These are seductive works that demonstrate little desire or wish to escape their contrary and conflicting nature.
Williamson describes Continuous Positive as an exhibition in which the ‘‘figure is both revered and deconstructed and at times completely abandoned’’.
At Chambers Gallery, Ed Lust in HAUNTS (finishing July 30) exhibits new paintings, intense and evocative in their imagery and lyrical and spacious in form and colour.
Lust’s work has this habit of disarming the gallery visitor’s perceptions of scale and context.
The paintings in HAUNTS are difficult to pin down, looking like Jackson Pollock’s abstractions, as well as a painterly tribute to both Claude Debussy and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.
Peter Gilmore and Shaun Murphy have previously exhibited together in New Zealand and Japan, and reunite for the pop-up exhibition, North Beach Painters at NEXT Gallery (from July 27 to 30).
Both share an attitude and connection to place, as well as the political, social and egalitarian.
New Brighton may not be immediately identifiable in their paintings and drawings but its presence is pervasive. North Beach Painters is the first of a series of regular pop-up exhibitions for NEXT Gallery.
From August, they will be a regular event the last week of each month.
Qbstudios off Lincoln Road is an office block that also includes gallery spaces. Currently on exhibition are works by Sam Clague, Janie Bruce and Olivier Chamberlain.
Clague’s paintings accommodate figuration and abstraction with a pop sensibility in the application of pure colour and choice of subjects. Clague’s best works embrace the deceptions of being a painter recreating something from the real world on the flat surface of a canvas.
A painting boldly titled Realism is anything but, with the reality of its interior space and its furnishings, suspended in space above themselves.
Skylands at Form Gallery (finishing July 27) is an exhibition of new sculptures by UK-born artist Andi Reagan, whose work explores the patterns and rhythms of the natural world.
Reagan’s sculptures are domestic in scale, symmetrical, brightly coloured and transparent.
The source material for the construction of these sculptures are plastic cable ties, transformed into organic rhythmical forms and sculptural structures.
In Skylands, Reagan raises the dignity of throwaway consumer items and industrial materials, through a makeover as engaging as the experience of viewing.
Finally, The Children’s Charter is a 10-metre mural by Mark Braunias in the Christchurch Art Gallery foyer opposite the entrance to its education room. Commissioned in 2010, Braunias’ line-up of evolving amoeba and humanoids is, at first glance, a disorderly assembly, encouraging the experience of transformation and confusion as one of the best lessons in life worth learning. Braunias delivers this message in a parade that explodes with energy and colour, and just the right touch of hesitancy and doubt.