Dull modern exposes generation gap

Eve Armstrong's lampshades and Gretchen Albrecht's 'A shower of gold'. Photo / Natalie Slade

A number of galleries this week have two simultaneous shows. In the case of the Michael Lett Gallery, the shows are complementary; Eve Armstrong, whose work is on the floor, chose the paintings by Gretchen Albrecht on the walls. The paintings are from all stages of Albrecht's career so it is a small retrospective designed to complement the younger artist's more avant garde work.

Armstrong has spent some time in Europe and, on her recent return, has made a number of arrangements of discarded material. Her work Roam was cardboard boxes, telephone books and a variety of coloured rubbish bags carefully arranged to look like casual rubbish.

At Michael Lett, she has two works. One is an arrangement of utterly commonplace furniture, cheap tables and chairs and drapes, apparently arranged randomly but in such a way that the eye is led from one object to another. Nevertheless, you cannot approach the arrangement or become part of it because, in addition to the furniture, there are big heaps of gravel and piles of broken brick that absolutely forbid movement within the work. It is like putting a statue on a pedestal.

The other work is a collection of lampshades, hanging from the high ceiling to somewhere near the floor. Once again the viewer is precluded from going too close by a layer of grit on the floor.

Both works are the stuff of the refuse bin made into art by being in a gallery. It is very dull stuff. Both works are conceptually clever but offer little excitement or energy. They just are. At most, they make an ironic comment on how some assemble awful things in domestic settings or the banal way we bring light to our life.

The work by Albrecht has colour and the dash and rush of brushwork. Some of the paintings were done as early as 1976 and, by 1981, in Red Steppe, there are the vivid characteristic washes of colour that became her established style. Her part of the exhibition climaxes in a big work done this year called A Shower of Gold, which has all the potent characteristics of her mature work. It is a semicircle of paint in movement with the right side filled by a great big yellow wave. This has a vibrant quality lacking in the work on the floor.

Is the difference a generational matter? Is it a contrast between modern and post-modern? Albrecht's work makes no comment. Must the modern work have some sort of implicit satire?

Skill in handling materials plays a large part in the twin exhibitions by Warren Viscoe and Christine Hellyar at Artis. Both have been off the scene for awhile but they return with sculpture that requires imagination to conceive and skill to carry through.

Viscoe's skills are in carving wood. A number of the works here are carved coats. They are shaped with all their folds intact, with the collar and lapels making a substantial arch in the centre. The wood is stained to a rich dark patina. Within the arch form are various supports with the natural shape of sticks. Each sculpture is a combination of coat and construction.

Viscoe's work has often had an unusual element of humour. The Stick Collector has sticks in the pockets of the coat; Carnivore has a dog in one pocket and bones in the other.

Other structures refer to classical architecture. The House of Virgil has pediments and an allusion to the traditional use of wax. It is not as successful as the lovely work, also a temple shape, called I Build a Hide for Wetas. This is a temple where the roof is supported by sticks as columns. It is a fascinating combination of antiquity and the antipodean.

Hellyar has always made her sculpture from found objects. In the past, it has sometimes been as ordinary as washing on a line but, generally, she has used natural objects and materials.

Her dozen or more works are cast bronze mounted on totara. The wooden plinth supports accurately cast bronze leaves of various shapes and colours. Each leaf carries the shape of a bird. They are not real birds but pieces of fern and cone that have approximated a bird shape. They reflect the endless variations in nature.

Each piece is a small triumph of observation and casting, making an utterly delightful show.

The Ivan Anthony Gallery houses another contrast between a curious dreamy Romanticism and the extreme of modern conceptual art. The romantic is Michael Harrison whose show From this World to the Next is a series of misty watercolours on paper. His work is about relationships. Reverie, like his work in the past, contains the profile of a cat confronting another cat with a third cat as a dream overhead. The whole is a soft vision made curious by the tail of one cat that reaches into one corner.

The simplicity of these watercolours is deceptive. Rule of Thumb contains only two images, a hand with thumb upward and a vase shape with big handles. It gives an extraordinary sensation of ritual. Sometimes the conscious naivety simply does not work like the drawing in A Horse in the Race but there are other times when a simple, carefully studied profile conveys a potent characterisation, as in the tense little portrait Double Agent.

At the other end of the gallery, Patrick Lundberg's work is astringent and conceptual enough to delight the heart of any curatorial gatekeeper wanting to make an exhibition to strain the credulity of the uninitiated. Fourteen thumbtacks distributed on a plain wall keep the eye moving around but to no apparent purpose. A shoelace hanging on the wall, a piece of broken batten hung by a cord led from the ceiling to the wall remotely evokes an execution but of who or what is unclear.

At the galleries

What: Making Arrangements, Gretchen Albrecht and Eve Armstrong

Where and when: Michael Lett Gallery, 2/285 Great North Rd, to December 23

TJ says: Young sculptor Armstrong, who makes arrangements of discarded rubbish, has two works on the floor, and has selected paintings by veteran Albrecht to hang on the wall in a fashionable feat of curatorship.

What: Bush Birds by Christine Hellyar; Coats of Bark by Warren Viscoe

Where and when: Artis, 280 Parnell Rd, to December 11

TJ says: Plant material in the shape of birds makes lively variations on a theme by Hellyar; Viscoe makes wall sculpture in the shape of coats and a variety of woody temples.

What: From this World to the Next by Michael Harrison; Quotes by Patrick Lundberg

Where and when: Ivan Anthony, 312 Karangahape Rd, to December 23

TJ says: Harrison is dreamy about relationships between cats and between people while Lundberg pushes the conceptual envelope with shoelaces pinned on the wall.

Check it out

For gallery listings, see nzherald.co.nz/gallerylistings