Small Works (2010)

The Small Works exhibition involves nine prominent artists.

Joanna Braithwaite’s new series “Good Sports 1-7” demonstrates her characteristic, unique mastery of humour and a remarkable painterly ability to combine human foibles with animal character.

Peter James Smith’s extended “The Sublime Echo – Study” series celebrates the NZ landscape – its physicality, beauty, remoteness – whilst holding it up to intellectual – scientific and historic – examination.

Peata Larkin has risen to prominence by pioneering a technique that combines the disciplines of painting, weaving and the role of geometric pattern. The result is works which have sculptural presence and a narrative language that reaches from the binary world of pixilation back to Maori traditions and legends.

Every Garry Currin painting, regardless of size, is comprised of many elements and contains details that slowly materialise. His paintings are an amalgam of architecture, event and landscape, where things seem to be happening or have just occurred and in this way time is collapsed. Stories are told, sensations of imminence and parables of human activity emerge.

Reuben Paterson’s adroit and adventurous use of glitter has taken that material from the world of child’s play into the leading art galleries of NZ and Australia. “The Medley of Nature” is a suite of black and white works, examining abstracted elements of the koru shape.

Paul Mason’s “Glass Crucibles” are a brand new extension of this well-known sculptor’s acclaimed practice. His use of glass is unlike other glass practitioners – he uses colour as a patina, tone like a painter, the supremacy of form, and the translucency of glass to define presence.

Callum Arnold has established in his landscape work the metaphor of a journey. He overlays or segments the composition with elements which may or may not have happened there or then. He uses reflection and the paradox of things glimpsed to embellish each work with multiple dialogues.

Karl Maughan has produced small works throughout his career, demonstrating in these an outstanding capacity to render scale and the specific architectural reality of a garden utterly convincingly.

Michael Hight’s paintings of beehives gain their intensity from attention to the minutest detail. A mastery of place is accompanied by an elegiac lyricism and a virtuoso range of representational skills.