Exhibitions
Auckland Darryn George Hikoi
Gow Langsford Gallery 31 October–24 November
PETER SIMPSON
Before Hikoi, I was aware of Darryn George’s work but had not looked at it closely. I had formed the impression of smart, coherent abstractions with strong colours and clean lines, including explicitly Maori elements (especially kowhaiwhai patterns), and of a stylistic whakapapa in which Gordon Walters (among others) figured prominently. What I found most interesting about his work was to see Walters being (as it were) reindigenised―an interesting circulation of painterly ideas, especially given the controversy in the 1990s surrounding Walters’ adaptation (appropriation?) of Maori design elements, notably the koru.
The biggest surprise of George’s new exhibition was to find Walters replaced (or joined) by McCahon as a pervasive point of reference. This connection is not disguised; if anything it is explicitly signalled―in titles, visual allusions and remarks in gallery documentation. The smaller works in the show deliberately evoke McCahon. Several are titled Gate, which references a major McCahon series of 1961–62 and also the 1988 survey exhibition, Gates and Journeys. George’s Gate #1 is a 400 mm. square; and there are two mid-sized works, Gate #10 and Gate #11 (each 660 x 1010 mm.), the former in landscape, the latter in portrait format. Another series of three small works (400 x 400 mm.) is called Journey (Gates and Journeys―get it?). A third series (with less overt McCahon connections) is called Satellite #1–4.
The and are closely related to the large work in the show, , by colour and form. Strong diagonals abound and the colours are dominated by blues (light through dark) and white, apart from ubiquitous narrow rectangular bars (common to all works in the exhibition) of red, black and white featuring kowhaiwhai patterns and words in Maori (block capitals), either separately or in combination. and are especially reminiscent of McCahon’s series of 1961, not in colour but in their strong diagonal shapes and the suggestion of obstacles and ‘ways through’, in the form of rectangles and squares. The series envisages views from space of the drama enacted in .
