There’s been a lot of colourful energy around the neighbourhood galleries during the wettest months of the year, from Wes Fieldhouse’s “provisional abstraction” at OREXART to Leigh Martin’s colourfields at Two Rooms.
With plenty on show by established artists, it is heartening to see less profiled artists having fun with confident exhibitions at our local art centres too. At BSA Gallery (part of Browne School of Art) last month was a lively show of paintings by Andrea Robinson.
Now a feisty 83, Andrea juggled raising a family with making art while studying at Elam in the mid-70s under Don Binney. Family life took her to Europe, and she felt unable to make art until she returned to New Zealand again at the age of 60. Her recent paintings are full of spontaneous, colourful gestures, sometimes dense and dirty; in other works the marks float sparse and airy.
Studio One Toi Tu has been exploding with exhibitions lately with, I’ve Made Up My Mind, curated with a maximalist feel by Phillip Tse. The walls teemed with colour and texture, artworks occupying every space, watched over by a tall sculptural form. Lee-Ann Sheather’s built-up ecosystems of threaded colour, beads and fabric were especially tactile and gorgeous.
In one of the adjoining galleries, A Small Conversation With Myself About Carpet, by Glen Armstrong, also used embroidery, often in combination with painted canvas surfaces. Other works were able to get a real sense of a close up relationship with patterned home furnishings through paint alone. Glen’s works have a lovely understated painterliness within the dead-pan humour of his show’s title.
In the other Studio One Toi Tu galleries were exhibitions of strongly coloured, geometric paintings by Paul Darragh and Harinder Hajpal, completing the sense of a building packed with people making brilliant works in the grey of a wet Auckland winter. EVAN WOODRUFFE, Studio Art Supplies
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