The galleries: Explorations of known world

By T J McNAMARA

Artists here have a choice: should they focus on this country and risk being labelled regional or should they follow international trends and be part of the big world out there?

It is really a question of style. At the New Gallery the international Triennial offers us challenging examples of conceptual, dry, personal and socially committed styles. The regionalist is usually plain and clear.

Upstairs at the main Auckland Art Gallery we have one of the most popular of those artists who have stuck to New Zealand subject matter. Don Binney hewed to a rhythmic, pictorial style at a time when all the pressure was towards minimal or expressionist abstraction.

His tightly organised compositions stylised aspects of our landscape into generalisations that summed up the character of coastal regions.

The iconographic quality was also emphasised by a careful selection of buildings such as Ratana churches closely linked to our land and history.

Above all there were the birds for which he is famous. They are always much larger than in reality. They were worked with thick, gluey paint so they became one with the hills and the scrub that crawled in the gullies. They were the birds of memory. If you close your eyes and recall a landscape and imagine a bird in it, it appears like a Binney-bird.

They symbolised many things: some were free, some were mating, some were endangered and turned their heads in fright.

Featherlight and floating they were not, except in the wonderful case of the frigate bird. Binney poised its wide wingspan over the blue line of the horizon in prints and paintings and the one in this retrospective show, Pacific Frigate Bird III, is the loveliest work in the show.

This exhibition, Binney - 40 Years On, runs until May 9 and is essential viewing. The only drawback is the commentary by the artist himself which is valuable but might have been kept separate from the show as it distracts from the business of looking.

Birds and eels are subjects at the McPherson Gallery where, until April 10, there is Kaik, an exhibition by Christchurch sculptor Bing Dawe, who uses both as symbols of the wild life of New Zealand, especially the estuarial life at the mouth of rivers. The general is founded in the particular as the inspiration for the show is the mouth of the Waitaki River.

In his sculpture Dawe uses a variety of materials: wood, steel, ceramic and wire netting and portrays eels with extraordinary exactness.

The centrepiece is Eel, Waitaki River where a huge eel hangs suspended from steel rods. It is the essence of an inert, captured creature yet it has a remarkable presence. The work is completed in an astonishing manner by contrasting the eel with a hoop of steel hanging beside it. The natural and the abstract create a powerful tension. The piece works as a fine sculptural composition.

The artist considers it a protest and expression of distrust of the proposal to modify the Waitaki River. A viewer without this knowledge will still feel the clash between natural and man-made forces is memorably expressed.

Most of the other work takes the form of circles of birds. The ritual form of these works gives them social significance. Each one is mounted on a steel spike which could easily be grotesque if the curve of the spike did not add rhythm to the composition. In Head Count the springy curve of the spike is turned outwards and the birds face in. It is made up of 36 fairy terns which is about the number remaining of this bird which faces extinction. It makes a precious, defensive necklace out of threat.

Throughout the show there is a sense of movement and flow in the repeated forms such as Bird Swallowing a Fish which is a formal pattern of birds, each with an exactly moulded flounder in its mouth.

Most shows that include conservation issues become preachy and are reduced to writing on the art work. This exhibition is show, not tell and has a subtle power that works at deep levels of concern. It is regionalist art at its strongest

Liam Davidson, at the Lane Gallery until April 9, is far less specifically regional but his work reflects our culture of beach and fitness and how our land constantly reaches into the sea.

He has a palette of colour all his own of dull orange and blue which evokes New Zealand harbours and estuaries. His colours contrast with the vivid white of bathing suits on his female forms.

The women in the paintings are all doing yoga and the titles of the works are mostly names of yoga poses. The paintings have a slightly rubbed look that pushes them away from the particular and emphasises their quality as paint in often very telling studies of the figure.

A notable example is Lone Surfer where there is a striking sense of the bather pushing against the water as she runs to the beach. The attitude of the arms is sharply observed.

When the artist pushes for extra significance and adds an ageing man in a hat watching young lovers on the beach the painting tries too hard and even the figures suffer. The left leg of one of the lovers is simply badly drawn. The flying whale in The Priestess, the Whale and the Models is equally awkward.

Nevertheless, this is an attractive show by an artist of maturity and assurance.