There are only a couple of days left to take advantage of the generosity of Fiona and Mark Richter while their Real Art Roadshow truck, featuring their private collection of works by some of New Zealand's greatest artists, is open to the public in the Octagon.
The exhibition illustrates many major trends in contemporary New Zealand art. In John Walsh's They'll be here soon (2004), the landscape emerges out of bands of natural earthy tones.
A single human-headed bird figure sits atop a Maori pou whenua looking out over a forest. The anthropomorphised bird form and the allusion to waiting in the title invites comparison with Bill Hammond's famous Birdland.
However, the work has quite a different atmosphere as there is a strong sense of Maori spirituality in Walsh's work.
Expressionist Philip Clairmont is represented by a small mixed media work on paper entitled Crucifixion or Christ as an hermaphrodite (1972). The work has the dynamism we associate with his larger painted works.
Postcolonial issues are raised in Tony de Lautour's Shore Party 1999. De Lautour is known for his appropriation of old, amateur landscape paintings as background for contemporary comment. The hybrid creatures in the foreground are engaged in decadent and destructive behaviour in an obvious critique of colonisation.
- New York artist Spencer Finch ("First Sight" at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery) seems like a modern-day explorer. Like early travellers to this land, Finch records what he has found here. In the past, our flora and fauna drew attention from scientists and artists.
Finch measures our fabled New Zealand light, once seen as the distinctive characteristic of our national style of painting.
These visually arresting works capture the vivid hues of an Otago rainbow or the deep blue of Franz Josef Glacier. In Strange Light (after the storm, Dunedin, March 29, 2008, 7.23 pm), brightly coloured gels form sheets that look like cellophane. Lit by theatre lights, these create an explosion of colour.
Two works draw on the artist's trip to Franz Josef Glacier. In Ice Cave, Fox Glacier, a fluorescent tube is wrapped in bands of coloured gels to reproduce the exact colour and intensity of light in the ice cave.
The tube is held within an old cabinet like those used to display scientific phenomena or curiosities. Moving around the work deepens your appreciation of it. When you stand behind it, coloured shadows on the wall behind alter as you move.
From the other side, the shape of the glass cabinet creates reflections on the wall behind that create the illusion of perspective.
The centre of the room is dominated by Gravity Always Wins (sky over Franz Josef Glacier, April 8, 2008 10.40 am). It is tempting to interpret this work as a comment about global warming and concern about melting glaciers. Finch has created a pool of deep blue water, fed by a silver chute filled with ice cubes tinted blue. Melting ice drips into the blue pool below, creating ripples in its surface.
The stillness at the far end of the pool is reminiscent of our collective paralysis on the issue of climate change. The deep blue of Finch's pool is like a pure monochromatic painting in
water.
This exhibit's the result of Finch's six-week residency at the gallery, provides a wonderful opportunity to enjoy the work of a celebrated contemporary artist from the other side of the world.
- The Complex patterns that characterise Martin Thompson's works on graph paper reveal an obsession with order and mathematics. Thompson is a recent addition to the local art scene. He has received international recognition and was recently included in an exhibition entitled "Obsessive Drawing'' at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
His carefully constructed works generally consist of a pair of images that are exact opposites, described as positive and negative.
The size of individual compositions varies markedly. Some sheets contain several individual but often interrelated patterns.
Many works reveal the lengths to which Thompson goes to achieve his precise creations, showing pieces that have been extracted to repair errors in the pattern.
Perhaps it is human nature to seek out external references for the patterns in Thompson's abstract mathematically-based works.
Some evoke intricate quilt patterns; some seem reminiscent of the screens of space invaders, while one pink work looks a little like a three-tiered cake. Whatever you see in them, Thompson's drawings are mesmerising.
- The term "zeitgeist'' in the title of the exhibition of German fashion photography (also at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery) is an apt choice, highlighting Germany's influence in the latter half of the 20th century.
Zeitgeist, "the spirit of the age'', refers to the intellectual and cultural climate of an era. This exhibition from the German Institute for Cultural Relations is being toured by the Goethe-Institut.
Images from the '40s and '50s epitomise the elegance of the period. The wasp-waisted style of the '50s is perhaps as unrealistic an ideal as the ever-decreasing size of the modern waif, but it is interesting to see the changing ideals of beauty depicted in these photographs.
Most of the high-glamour shots can quickly be assigned to particular decades but those that embrace a more casual style, like Will McBride's Barbara McBride with Shawn are timeless.
This image from 1960 marks an important turning point in the representation of pregnant women in fashion.
It is one of the many photographs that draw attention to changes in society.
Some of the great names in photography are here, including Helmut Newton and Thomas Rusch. This is a fabulous show for fans of fashion or photography.
