1988 President’s Exhibition

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 13

1988 President’s Exhibition

“The City Under Change. 1988 President’s Exhibition,” at the C.S.A. Gallery, until October 9. Reviewed by Pat Unger. The President’s exhibition at the C.S.A. this year ambitiously promises the portrayal of city life — its diverse views and its influence on invited artists' work, with significantly only 16 per cent of them women. 12 painters from Dunedin, Auckland and Christchurch capture "psychological, intellectual, spiritual and physical” profiles of our urban environment. These “urban landscapes under change” are disappointing. Even with a theme, the show’s impact is less than memorable. Last year’s “Big Paintings,” with its qualifying “big,” was unified and looked good. But that was in pre-October 1987, days when a spirit of optimism and an urgency to acquire art objects was abroad. Present altered attitudes and other factors including indifferent hanging, make this just not a challenging show. Only Martin Whitworth’s “Architektones 1,” Robert Ellis’s large hanging canvasses with their professional, contrived

review

tensions, and Alison Ryde’s picturesque French postcards, attack the walls of this generous but cool gallery space with vigour. George Baloghy’s excellent “Queen Street” loses a degree of impact in its unsympathetic surrounding. Doris Lusk’s construct, boxed and lidded for intimate reflection, needs a feeling of defined space to enjoy its well argued points of view. “The City: Respectful Distances,” by John Hawkhead, reinforces the unsuitability of the Mair Gallery (and this format) to present a series of small photographs to their best advantage. The Formica and vinyl double bed by Derrick Cherrie, alone in the Gallery’s empty floor space, looks happy. It is a solitary monument to shiny modernism, to the execrable good taste espoused by glossy magazines and

to the. desire of New Zealanders for eternal cleanliness. Michael Armstrong’s "The search for identity in the city of illusions” impacts its space with assertion. This generously painted, wooden planking construct cancels out, in a quite flamboyant manner, the doubt implicit, in the title. Eion Stevens’ interior/ exterior landscapes, with topical allusion to berets, black moustaches, guerrillas, the desert and decoratively empty hotel rooms, are about Beirut or some such Middle Eastern trouble spot.

Paul Woodruffe’s “The City Spreads” is inventively interesting. Its visual play with surface, dimension and image is an improvement on his

“In the City Garden” with its contrasting natural patterns and gridded designs arguing with each other. The essence of the President’s exhibition is best captured in the works of Alan Pearson and Paul Cullen. They stand at opposite ends of the spectrum and splendidly so. Pearson’s “Portrait of Matt (the Maori) in London, Winter 198485,” its figure, its theatrical background and sense of-empathy for those from the South Pacific, deprived of sunlight, is true painterly expressionism. Paul Cullen‘s cast concrete block with its grey, Gothic simplicity and its crumpling edges is a sombre minimalist comment on the vanities of urban life.