Wellington gallery provides ANZ Bank with ideal purchase

Hamish McKay
Page Blackie Gallery
Bowen Gallery

Several Wellington galleries have innovative shows on for the rest of the week, including an ideal purchase for ANZ Bank at the Hamish McKay Gallery.

Billy Apple’s sole work at the Hamish McKay Gallery is one of his most important works of recent years, going to the heart of his concerns about transformation and transaction.

The work consists of a red neon work CASH, a work on canvas with the words “LUNCHES A barter between Billy Apple and Hamish McKay” and a bank deposit slip for the artist's ANZ account.

The work can be purchased for cash, by barter, by a deposit to his account and presumably any other form of transaction that is mutually agreeable as long as it is around the high $40,000s that the piece is on the market for.

The work brings togerther a range of media and ideas that the artist has been involved with over the past few years coming under the general umbrella of his series of works entitled The Artist Has to Live like Everyone Else.

What these works look at is both the nature of the final transaction of buying art as well as the way in which the purchaser becomes part of the artwork and the process of creating and validating the art work. In a way, they become part of what Edward de Bono refers to as collaborative creativity.

At the Page Blackie Gallery, Max Gimblett has installed On the shores of Infinity, another huge exhibition of 26 works similar to one exhibited recently at John Leech and Gow Langsford in Auckland.

There is a fabulous work, Both Light ($105,000) of gold and black gestural flourishes on a white gold background. It embodies various aspects of spirituality, physical beauty and aesthetic expression. He also has a large, bloody red quatrefoil work, Painted Moon ($109,250).

There are several small quatrefoil works ($13,125 each), including Christ in Glory, a silver work which resembles a catholic ostensorium with its rays emanating from the centre.

The works have titles referring to a range of subjects. As well as the Christian religion there is jazz, eastern religions, botanical and biological subjects and art from a number of periods notably the 20th century. One work, Venus – After Botticelli ($19,950) seems to be more related to the Pacific than the Renaissance with its brown central stylised hibiscus shape.

Kim Pieters is showing Matisse’s Armchair at Bowen Gallery, a set of works on recycled panels. Each of the works feature bold underpainting in pinks that have been scattered with shapes, symbols and clouds of colour, suggesting amorphous ideas as well as the presence of the boldly colourful inclined Matisse.

The boards, which are peppered with the nail and screw holes of their former use, bring a sense of order and regimentation to the graffiti-like squiggles that seem to morph into human figures and natural forms.