New spin on shapes and colours

Is abstract art finished? A couple of exhibitions show that there is life in the old style yet but in the 21st century you have to have a bit of extra spin. You need a special touch.

A notable case is Judy Millar who has been given the opportunity to work on a large scale in the New Gallery as part of its 10th-anniversary celebrations. Her work is defined by her touch. Against a background of patches of colour, she pushes thin paint in swoops and folds using mainly her fingers. The images have complexity and energy.

Her usual kind of work can be seen in a parallel exhibition at the Gow Langsford Gallery until October 22. At the New Gallery she works on huge rectangles of canvas surrounded by airy dashes of paint on the wall to link the painting to the architecture. The paint is pulled about by scraping and sweeping devices that give bigger forms than her fingers could achieve. The work owes an acknowledged debt to abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, but lacks the lyric quality of his dripped paintings. Instead, there is a hectic intensity that is almost incoherent. Only when voids intervene is there real tension.

The show at the Gow Langsford is shared with German artist Katarina Grosse, who is showing two splendid paintings. One is a combed stroke on overlapping bands of colour that modify each other as they cross in an extraordinarily complex way. The interaction produces changes in colour and in space. The other painting has large forms hung in falls of colour with a soft and mysterious, yet assertive, effect.

Still in the realms of abstraction are the works of Matthew Browne at Artis Gallery in Parnell until October 23. His spin is that the viewer can participate in all the decisions of shape and colour. His touch is a swooping rhythmic linear style with the area between loops filled with colour and crossed with spontaneous, looser areas.

The viewer shares the motion of the hand in a tactile way and the artistic decisions in an intellectual way. We can follow the choice of which colour goes where and which form will rhyme with another.

On one wall are 28 small paintings identical in size, effect and quality. The impression is of similar chords struck tunefully again and again. Of the larger works, Spin Cycle, stands out because its parabolic loops are contrasted with a circle, painted spontaneously but firmly geometrical.

Just what can happen to abstract art in this century is exemplified by the lively work of Martin Poppelwell in an exhibition called The Undesirables, at the Anna Bibby Gallery until October 22.

He is a kind of Lord of Misrule who thinks with his nerves. Everything is jumpy. His paintings are collections of loosely painted, overlapping, irregular rectangles in a variety of colours. On their own, they would make up vigorous abstract paintings. One work of four panels is as large as the architectural works by Millar at the New.

Poppelwell's particular spin is to letter each rectangle with a sort of rubric. Written every which way, they become a jumble of ideas like the memory and unconscious. The lettering as well as the messages is quirky, individual and nervy. In the biggest work, Study for a Red Cross, the mind is indicated by a patchy skull.

Naturally, a lot of work that is not abstract is also not realistic. The work of John Walsh, at the John Leech Gallery until October 22, deals with myth and legend. Yet it is still the nature of the paint that gives these works their special quality. They are done on a hard surface with thin paint which can be swept to provide atmospheric effects or marked through so that the white surface is revealed in a luminous but still tactile way.

The wraith-like quality that the sweeping technique confers is seen at its best in the painting of the invading soldier Ferdinand von Tempsky in pursuit of his Maori enemy by the shores of a sounding sea.

The etched touch is effective in depicting symbolic thistledown and the intricate form of an eel trap. This is a show where strangeness, wonder and uncertainty culminate in the isolated figure of Tama is Unsure of His Whakapapa.