Inventive work in exalted company

Annette Isbey's 'Baptism' has a Renaissance influence within a strong New Zealand context.

While two important McCahon exhibitions dominate the Auckland art scene there are, as always, other shows of artists, new and established, whose work is full of interest.

The well-recognised Annette Isbey is represented by just one painting. Despite some heady company, her Baptism dominates the show called Essence at the Milford Gallery until September 2.

Isbey's work has always been large, simple and monumental and Baptism - which shows a couple drawing life from a waterfall and a landscape characterised by a cabbage tree - has a specific New Zealand context. There is an obvious debt to the Italian Renaissance, but this handsome painting has something important to say about here and now.

The show introduces Rebecca Harris, whose work on a curved circular surface within a fancy frame joins a woman, an owl and a lancewood in a peculiar surreal combination that is all her own. Even the title She Devil in My Garden is peculiarly different.

Peter Gibson-Smith is a long-established painter whose way with materials is always extraordinarily inventive. He has a show called Fabrications at the Bath Street Gallery in Parnell until September 30.

It is the process of making that is always important in Gibson-Smith's work, where the images themselves can be surprisingly banal.

There is a whole series of works made with an extraordinary combing technique that must surely have some reference to circuitry and allude to the apparent simplicity of the binomial functioning of computers.

A background layer of colour is finely combed with parallel lines which help define an image of a bird dimly perceived through the pattern. This use of paint is astoundingly clever but the ultimate image is compelling only by reason of the technique.

The dryness of this work is also apparent in a sculptured head made up of stacks of blocks, each lettered with a name of a book on portraiture.

The interaction of a verbal interest and a visual one is in keeping with Gibson-Smith's earlier work, as are two big works with encaustic and repeated patterns.

Called Linen, it is the grandest thing in the show. It is a portrayal of crumpled linen on a giant scale and the folds suggest an ageing face. The whole emerges from a repeated pattern of crosses and the technique is astounding in its complexity.

It is a while since Gibson-Smith has had an exhibition in Auckland. Although his inventiveness and skills are apparent, the images have somehow lost the haunting power of his earlier work.

Another established artist whose work has not been seen here in a gallery for some time is Andrew Drummond, whose Views of Particles is at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery until September 16. His work is deftly engineered yet a little messy.

A typical work is Reciprocating Device Drawing, where brass machinery drags an arm equipped with fibreglass quills across a slab of marble covered with coal dust.

The quills flex, bend and flick in a fascinating manner and make dragged lines in the coal dust. Precision meets randomness.

Coal has a particular attraction for Drummond.

Some of his splendid photographic prints show masses of coal in its hard jewel-like blackness.

One of the sculptures hanging from the roof and made of brass rods is a space-age showcase for coal presented as specimen and sculpture.

Elsewhere, the randomness of forms such as coal is contrasted with the precision of glass tubing as the glass thrusts through the centre of large pieces of rock.

The combinations of things natural and things engineered are pure Drummond and stimulate interest and thought in many different ways.

Oedipus Rex Gallery, until September 15, is showing the work of two new artists. In both cases their work is a special sort of still-life. They are the representation of simple things and rely a great deal on what the viewer brings to the visual experience.

Mark Goody makes large brown paintings of New Zealand coins from the time before decimal currency. What an older generation might draw from the work is deep nostalgia for the tiki on the ha'penny, the crossed clubs on the thruppence, the tui on the penny, the chief with his spear on the shilling.

The works have colour and atmosphere and successfully evoke memories without being sentimental. Sometimes, as with the kiwi on the florin, where the horizon extends beyond the coin to a range of misty hills, the painting rises to something more resonant than simple still-life. In the other gallery at Oedipus, Alannah Brown in her show The Woolshed does small precise paintings on a panel of things found in the shed. The labels on tins, the stencils on cases, the lettering on oil containers is exactly conveyed in colour or in sepia.

A painting such as Super Tractor Oil rises almost to the intensity of an icon. It is a show of many discrete delights.

The most enigmatic show in town is photographs by Yvonne Todd at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until September 9. It is called Blood in its Various Forms, although there is no blood to be seen.

Yet, in her characteristic manner, Todd forces us to speculate on the meaning of the thick white towel clutched to the belly of a wide-eyed, well-dressed young woman who resembles nothing so much as a Barbie doll.