Playthings of mystery and imagination

Frances Hodgkins in her Bowen St studio.

It is an outstanding week for sculpture. Traditional plays modern in materials as well as stillness versus movement. Contemporary art is a house with many mansions.

The more traditional sculpture is at Whitespace in Curran St, where Steve Woodward has an exhibition until November 10. It is conventional in that it uses marble and bronze or, more unusually, cast iron. It is shaped for a public place and has more than a hint of social comment.

The cast-iron piece lends its character and concept to the show, which is called See Toy. It is like a giant top, designed to rock with a bobbing movement, at once playful and ominous.

Above is a spindly tree topped with a mushroom shape. It combines the beauty of a natural form with the sinister connotations of the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion.

The toy idea, that we are the playthings of the gods of technology, is continued in another top called Sea Toy. The wide disc of the face of the top is also an ocean disc lettered in braille with the idea that many things are under the surface of life, unintelligible to most of us. The braille is French for "shipwrecks under the skin".

Three other large pieces are reminders of the monumental, weighty quality that marble and bronze can convey.

The work in black marble is a thing of mottled, polished luxury. Although it is simply handsome, the sculptor intends something more - a reference to beef carefully cultivated for the luxury market.

It is hard to deduce this idea from the work, which appeals more for its smooth, opulent beauty than the social comment.

The same contradiction of stylish presence and confused message is true of Indigence, a hollow-eyed buffalo head with a complex landscape of skin stretched over bones. Since it sits up proud like the knight on a chessboard, it looks splendid and stark but not starving.

A version in bronze is wrapped, and this veiled version is more mysterious.

Unspecific subjects but visual quality work best in a group of three marbles, where the subject emerges from the stone in the manner of Rodin. Woodward has found the form within the stone and given us room for our imagination to play across the three variants of colour from black basalt to white.

What is impressive about this show is the sheer confidence of the sculptor tackling such potent materials so confidently on such a large scale.

In the largely unheralded work of Waiheke-based Dutch sculptor Aiko Groot, at the Gow Langsford Gallery until November 19, the material is brushed anodised aluminium, which lends its beautiful satiny surface to the two tall columns made of simple cubes. They have a mystery - movement caused by mechanisms hidden within the boxes. As you watch the stack of five cubes that make up Large Boxes, they begin to part and tilt.

Each box is joined to the other along only one edge. The hinge is visible only to the inquiring eye.

It is much better to stand back and marvel at the way the boxes tilt precariously and appear to defy gravity and all expectation. The opening and shutting proceeds slowly, which confers a sense of inevitability of the process.

The big column is fascinating. The smaller column, Tall Boxes, is more elegant and has the special quality of lifting, as it were, its toes off the floor.

The idea that kinetic art has had its day has always been contradicted by the lively work by George Rickey, which has graced the courtyard of Auckland Art Gallery for many years. It is a real compliment that these works by Aiko Groot are equally beautifully made and almost equally impressive.

There is only until Saturday to see Gretchen Albrecht's characteristic oval works at the Sue Crockford Gallery. They are painted directly on the wall in imitation of fresco and given sculptural form in stainless steel.

The sculptures cannot compete with the colour of the painting and perhaps need an outdoor setting over water to come to life.