KEY POINTS:
It is an exciting time for art in Auckland. With the Auckland Art Gallery cramped by re-development, the dealer galleries have emerged with a banquet of widely varied dishes.
Leading the way was a show by overseas artists that included the much-publicised doyen of British art, Damien Hirst.
His work is at the Gow Langsford Gallery, now located at 26 Lorne St. What we have is one of his famous vitrines, containing not a multi-million-dollar shark or half a cow, but a preserved heart transfixed by a dagger.
What can we make of it? It certainly contrasts art and life. The grey preserved heart is grimly realistic. This undoubted reality is pierced by a pristine, dangerous weapon, produced entirely by human craft. As the work apparently floats in its case, it evokes a number of ideas.
The image suggests a deadly thrust to the heart. It suggests religious motifs; the sacred heart pierced with wounds. It also suggests the dreadful finality of wounds to the heart and it is also a curious object. Along with all of these, there is a kind of symmetrical elegance to the object tempered by the grey reality of the preserved muscle. It manages to bring off a combination of surgery, murder, art and curiosity.
There are other fine things in this exhibition in its grand new setting, notably a sculpture by Tony Crag full of rhythmic energy and movement, some work by Chinese artists and two vast bold paintings by our own Chris Heaphy, one of which creates a skull to rival the diamond-studded version created by Hirst.
The flat black silhouettes that Heaphy assembles into his paintings recall one era in the work of Richard Killeen.
Killeen, the New Zealand master artist, has a show himself at Ivan Anthony gallery called Butterfly Evening, which runs until June 14. Throughout his long career, with its continuing development of technical resources, Killeen has changed styles repeatedly while always retaining themes and images that are his own.
Some of his work has attained iconic status and adorns public galleries and universities, but never has he produced works as complex as these strange clusters of towers, idols and flying objects. The works hover somewhere between painting and prints. They are generated using the resources of images in Killeen's computers and are printed out on prepared canvas - not in ink, but in paint.
Their complexity is staggering. In Three O'Clock Gathering, there are doll-like forms which crowd together and, although their eyes stare fixedly, they seem isolated from each other like detached thoughts.
Among them fly the spiky forms of stinging insects whose wings are beautifully patterned lacework but whose forms are all thick, wooden and artificial. In the midst there is a clock set at the hour of three. What is remarkable about the shapes is that they are shaded to be convincingly three-dimensional. Behind them are darknesses and the feeling of monsters in the night.
The effect could be terrifying, but the variety of colour and pattern mitigates the darkness. What we have in this image are the constructions of the mind with hints of childhood memory - colour, darkness, things that attack and things that comfort. This is a grotesque realm of thought and memory.
Other works have other realms. Butterfly Evening, the work that gives its name to the exhibition, has everything pushing forward in a sense of excitement.
Big City Jar is made up of tall vessels in columns resting on uncertain points. Among the columns flies a World War II Catalina. Amid this dense city, there are figures with pursed enigmatic lips and even a flutter of tadpoles with bright eyes.
There are two smaller works: a ladybird that incorporates a fish tail and another such insect with abstract patterns on its back - diamond shapes such as Killeen used long ago when he was an abstract painter. These are fine pieces of design, but it is the large works that are evidence of an exceptional visual imagination and the technique to realise it.
As well as these magisterial works, the tradition of pleasant domestic art is alive and well in Auckland. It is evident in two shows of landscape painting, one post-modern and the other neo-impressionist.
James Kirkwood, at the Anna Miles Gallery until June 7, does landscapes often seen from a high viewpoint that combine the character of the view and artificial colour effects. A typical work is Shadow, a grey landscape of a manor and park in England. Avenues of trees, walls and gates, lakes and walks are all shadowy, but the manor is a big assertive chunk in yellow with touches of red.
This practice of pinging highlights of bright colour against an overall background of tone is what gives a post-modern flourish to these lively works.
Even more conventional, as a sort of modest Monet, is the work of Graham Downs at the Satellite Gallery until June 1. The show is called Sunny Side Up and there are exactly 50 little paintings of Auckland coastal and city scenes, all filled with light and very deftly painted. Out of the 50 there are only two failures. The rest are full of charm and joy in water, clouds and sky.
To complete this total range of work, there are the pencil drawings of James Ormsby at whitespace until the end of the week. He draws intricate layers of sky, sea and underworld in a way that links Pakeha and Maori and the migration that both have made to these islands. The works are large, ingenious and use the swell of the ocean, the ride of canoes and the intricacy of sculpture to create a very convincing personal mythology.
