Interventionist – Reinventionists
Group exhibition featuring artists, Greg Johns, Peter Donovan, Russell G Shaw, Barry Francis Squire, Bernard Winkels, Peter Geekie, Alastair Galbraith and Scott McFarlane.
A show of mature practicing artists from around New Zealand, depicting informative art practice, independent consciousness and outside relevance to the ever shifting art industry.
As far afield as Dunedin 2006 art laureate Alistair Galbraith has created unique experimental paintings describing sublime wintery, southern landscapes that converge into abstract realisations. Utilising plastic bags and gyroscopic overlays using kebab stick utensils to drag colours into each other the surface has a organic marbled effect and kaleidoscopic patina. Internationally respected as an artist and musician Alistair’s work has graced the George Pompidou centre in France.
Scott Macfarlane is a full time avant-garde artist based in Kerikeri. He delivers a thoughtful collection of beautiful painterly works with subliminal undertones. There is a haunting aspect most apparent in ‘If your feeling sinister,’ in which a beautiful darkness emanates with suggestive reason, and shadowy figures are anchored in an other worldly void. Titles give us clues to the narrative of the work, for instance ‘Pictures of the past change their meaning fast,’ is a landscape both contemporary and ancient.
Kawhia based Ngati Pakeha and bohemian artist Russell G Shaw, has Duchamp sitting on his shoulder while arguing out various psychic séances with his collaged artwork. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s Venus feature in the many and various renderings, dragging old and new into a washing machine of irony and semiotic poses. Models Donna and Karinne also provide dialogue come and see!
Collage is also incorporated in artworks by Barry Francis Squire from Whangarei who hunts down an interventionist in his piece ‘What’s the oil-Aue.’ Bludgeoning paper has been worked to reflect the decayed images of Gods and higher powers. Astro- physicians
and mathematicians are invited to have a cup tea and narcissist mirrors of the past gaze into the Cumulus Nimbus clouds. In ‘Dev Junín and the square root of the hypercephalus,’ the Dev Junín figure is torn between an image of high notion Baroque, and a seven stepped pyramid of prime numbers reaches for the interceding chemical trails.
Opua’s Peter Geekie channels artist T.S. Lowry and deep pools varnish over Fomison’s awkward smile. The artist rides a bike across the American continent and dares to call it ‘Ink Blot,’ but only after vanquishing an alien and taking psychic snippets of the epervesent charnel houses of mid America. In the painting ‘Celia’s Grandfather,’ crowds loiter at the cocktail bar in the mother ship. They seem to be waiting for an inter-galactic parliament to resume. The masterful ‘Plan’ tosses about figurines like voodoo dolls and skewered heads present themselves to a nicely attired beaurocrat.
Peter Donovan from Wellington depicts heroes of the outsider world in his folk art portraits, ‘Call me Tiger’ a painting of North Auckland and All Black rugby great Peter Jones and ‘Wild Bill Hickock and the Ace of Spades.’ Jones has been described as a
‘gentle giant’ and the portrait has him clothed in Northland’s blue jersey with icons of his life painted on each side. Donovan’s ‘Angel’ painting hovers above the artworks ‘Kowhai and Pohutakawa’- it is after all an interventionist summer.
Also from Wellington Greg Johns ‘Tui’ sings a speech bubble full of rainbows. Johns print works simplifies the human condition to an acceptable visual manifest of straight forward images and support roles for stick figures without peripheral vision. John’s
reality reinvents linear figures in muted tones and chromatic sensitivity.
‘Black works,’ an installation of six black paintings by Hawkes Bay artist Bernard Winkels illustrates the trajectory of an enmasse asteroid fall and some what ambivalent space junk intrusions. His finely crystallized renderings lead us to view negative space
infused with reinvented aerodynamic industrial diamonds powered with a well worked three dimensional graphite sheen.
Show runs till mid Feb 2019
