The Far Side by Michael Parekowhai. Photo / Steven McNicholl
This week features three big names in New Zealand art. One from the past, one with a huge body of work behind him and one who has recently achieved significant recognition.
Michael Parekowhai, whose work is at the Michael Lett Gallery, is having his first show since he was our successful representative at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition consists of one huge work that bisects the gallery with an adjunct formed around a concrete pillar. The gigantic wall at first appears to be made of strips of colour. The paint on these strips, all the same width, is finished to a high polish and the surfaces are immaculate.
The surfaces are in 10 different colours, all intense except when they are intercepted by a square of white. When you move to the other side of the wall, you realise it is identical to the first side. The thickness of the wall is equal to the width of the strips.
At this point, the viewer is aware each piece of the wall is a block rather than applied decoration. You probably have to be told rather than realise that these are gigantic Cuisenaire blocks where the colour and length of the block vary according to the number they represent. As small blocks, they were used to teach place value in new entrants classes.
This is Parekowhai doing again what he has often done in the past, taking something from childhood and reworking it through an art medium into a looming presence in the memory in an adult world. Previous works of this kind have included giant pick-up sticks and large plastic parts for model aeroplanes.
Here, the explicit reference to childhood is made by putting two toy rabbits on single blocks that jut out of the wall. On one side of the wall, a male rabbit wears a blue overall, while on the other side a female rabbit in a green pinafore dress with a green blouse is looking very satisfied with the carrot she clutches.
In childhood, these must have been tiny dolls; here in memory they are enlarged to emphasise the difference between childhood and adulthood and their presence is inescapable.
The rabbits give the whole installation a slightly comic touch, yet it is massive enough to be a serious achievement. The quality of the finish is extraordinary. The paint surfaces are shiny, intense and immaculate. It would be easy to dismiss it as the trivial made big but arithmetic acquired in childhood alongside the jumble of other colourful things like toys is an integral part of the world. So why not make a monument to the fundamental things we learned when we were five?
Over in Parnell at the Pierre Peeters Gallery is another exhibition made up of strips of highly polished intense colour. This show is by the New Zealand Chinese artist Harry Wong who, under his given name Wong Sing Tai, won the first Benson and Hedges Art Award. This was the first big art prize to compete with the long-running Kelliher Art Award. It was a generous prize and many prominent artists entered. It was a surprise when the judge gave the prize to then unknown Harry Wong in 1968.
This is his first exhibition in at least 25 years. The painting that won so long ago was a claustrophobic interior but these works are completely abstract with a high polish because the stripes of pure colour are painted on the back of Perspex. The bands of colour are intersected by diagonal lines so they fall into a jagged rhythm. Like the work of Parekowhai, they are superbly finished, even to the stainless steel frames that make each painting a complete art object.
Typically, four of the seven works are called Strata. Only one of the seven has any curved shapes and it has a historical association as homage to Paul Klee. The exhibition is an excellent demonstration of brilliant design but the artist does not feel the need to reach back into memory or philosophy. The paintings just are.
Philip Trusttum has had a long career as a painter with a wonderful sense of colour who has continually experimented with different ways of presenting his work, often using large areas of unframed canvas painted on the floor rather than the easel. He has also frequently cut and collaged canvas on canvas to achieve his effects. His subjects have always been taken from the world around him even when they have been transformed into extremely stylised patterns. He has painted his farm, his tractors and his grandchildren as well as responding to music.
Exceptionally in New Zealand art, his paintings have sometimes been inspired by sport. He did an excellent series of paintings of tennis.
Topically, his latest exhibition at Whitespace is a series about rugby. The paintings are done on cutout pieces of canvas without background or framing. The pieces are joined and articulated by riveting. This method enables him to give a sense of the jarring contacts of rugby: people knocked off their feet, the ball dislodged and flying high, the tumble of bodies that take on the oddest angles. The figures themselves with their big boots with huge sprigs are archetypes. No other painter of rugby has achieved the same sense of contact and movement.
This is spectacularly shown in a work called Australia/Ireland where one player is scoring a try and another tumbles over him. The big hit aspect of rugby is seen in a work called Done and in another 1995/LOMU/UN.
These individual encounters are lively in themselves and good design use is made of colour. Although these groupings are effective, the whole exhibition really comes across as one large work, traversing the length of the gallery like a frieze. It makes a fine adjunct to the Rugby World Cup.
At the galleries
What: Parekowhai
Where and when: Michael Lett, 285/2 Great North Rd, to November 12
TJ says: A wall made of blocks equivalent to Cuisenaire rods and some toy rabbits make a monument to childhood maths and play.
What: Interception by Harry Wong
Where and when: Pierre Peeters Gallery, Habitat Courtyard, 251 Parnell Rd, to October 29
TJ says: Bold colour and subtle interplay of simple shapes and a high degree of finish make this an impressive return to the art scene after many years.
What: Philip Trusttum
Where and when: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, to October 22
TJ says: Sport is a surprisingly rare subject in New Zealand art but Trusttum's cut-out canvases capture the jarring contact and the colourfulness of rugby with wit and style.
Check it out
For gallery listings, click here
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