Colin McCahon in Auckland

A large black-and-white photograph of the back of Colin McCahon’s head, seen in deep shadow with ears extending like radar dishes, greets you at the entrance to A Place to Paint: Colin McCahon in Auckland, curated by Ron Brownson and Julia Waite. McCahon is in the driver’s seat of a pre-war jalopy, his hands grip the steering wheel and his head is cocked slightly to the left as he looks through the windscreen towards the upcoming bend in the road. This is the artist barrelling along in a sun-bleached semi-rural locale, as if he is indeed seeking out a place to paint. A blow-up of a snapshot taken circa 1970 and presumably prised from a family album, it acts as a marker, too, that this showcase of just 25 artworks (admittedly, some are serial combinations) is a journey back in time, charting a spiritual as well as an artistic odyssey between the years 1953 when McCahon arrived in Auckland from Christchurch and 1982 when he stopped painting altogether.

There are many ways into the crackling force field, the dynamic geomorphology that is McCahon country, including the chronological arrangement favoured by this show, albeit with vague gestures towards topography of place. Rather than reprise the landmark exhibitions of the past, A Place to Paint opts to salute the centenary of McCahon’s birth with a sampling based mostly on the gallery’s own holdings, often acquired haphazardly rather than systematically.

And although the exhibition is arranged as a jaunty progression through a certain period of art history, it has also been hung with a kind of due reverence, so that upon entering it you feel as if you are joining a religious procession, one that winds around the walls of three large rooms (1976–77). Perhaps the sly typographical error noted in this work’s wall label is an attempt to puncture the holy-roller reverence: ‘The sudden news stimulated the [sic] . . . ’.