KEY POINTS:
When I visited the New Gallery last week with Auckland Art Gallery international curator Mary Kisler, four men were wrestling with a beautiful nude. She was winning. Venus Italica, circa 1812, a marble statue by Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova, is a very heavy girl and the efforts to
ease her on to a plinth in what will be a pool looked potentially finger-chopping.
Venus Italica graces a room in the gallery's new show, The Enchanted Garden, which opens today and takes over the entire exhibition space. Every aspect of "the garden" is explored in 140 works from the gallery's collection, along with items from Auckland Museum and contemporary works by New Zealand and international artists.
Venus Italica, presented to the gallery in 1931, belongs in the show because statues of mythological figures have played a significant role in formal gardens since the time of the Roman Empire.
Historic gardens, such as the Renaissance Villa d'Este at Tivoli, and the Medici Garden at Pratolino, near Florence, are stunning examples of the tradition of integrating symbolic riddles within the garden layout. Anyone can enjoy the garden's aesthetics; those "in the know" can unravel its intellectual challenges.
Gallery visitors can simply enjoy the beauty of the gardens, albeit through a filter, in works such as Pieter Schenck's engraving The Shell Fountain in the Gardens of Villa d'Este, a place Kisler has visited, and Piranesi's etching of The Temple of Sibyl, Tivoli.
The exhibition is in six sections.
The first is Floribunda, which includes a series of large images of flowers by American photographer Ernst Haas, and Boulogne, a photo of a bouquet by Michael Parekowhai.
The Night Garden section includes huge black and white screenprints of flowers by Paul Morrison, counterpointed by Ruud van Empel's 2007 print Serie Venus, a black nude in a garden, and Bill Hammond's Giant Eagle, a massive painting depicting the giant eagle playing a moa bone cello.
Next we enter Harvest, which examines the "vanitas" aspects of orderly fruit and vegetable cultivation, along with the significance to cultures of creating gardens.
This area includes a knitted house teapot cover by Heather Nicholson from the museum collection, a 1969 photo by Marti Friedlander of Alf and May Coppell in front of their almost obsessively neat garden, and collage works by "outsider" artist Isobel Bailey of the shelter of a garden with cats cut out from Jellimeat labels peeping out from behind the bushes.
Botanica demonstrates the historical expansion of plant collecting and classification, while The Garden of Marvels includes such wonders as the etching of Villa d'Este.
The final section reveals how, in religious Western art, The Walled Garden symbolises female purity - or its downfall. A wall can also mean entrapment. Walter Sadler's Married, circa 1913, is a portrait of a young couple in a walled garden, a study of a marriage which has already lost its spark.
The Enchanted Garden has activities for children, and the show features free events for the family tomorrow from 10am-4pm including weaving, story telling and Christmas tree decoration. At a time when many of us should be weeding our own patches over the summer, the exhibition offers an alternative indoor walk in the park.
Exhibition
What: The Enchanted Garden
Where and when: New Gallery, December 13-March 15
On the web: www.aucklandartgallery.