Exhibitions

Auckland

Viky Garden say it to my face

Warwick Henderson Gallery 1–18 August

BETH GOLDNER

While many may argue that portraiture is no longer relevant in contemporary painting, Viky Garden continues to challenge this assumption. Garden took a hiatus from painting in 2015. Stuck in a creative cul-de-sac, she spent the summer playing backgammon, trusting her inquisitiveness would return. It did.

Eschewing the traditional aspects of oil painting, she chose a new medium: liquid acrylic and, in place of brushes, she used bits of card, introducing experimentation and allowing abstraction to dictate form. What followed was a succession of paintings that culminated in her recent series, say it to my face.

These 12 portraits of a woman are eerie and without strong familiar lines to shape the subject’s face, but nevertheless they are distinct, oriented, and feminine. On close inspection, the viewer sees how the swatches, streaks, and splashes of crimson, black and cream-gold, as well as moments of orange, link these portraits in a journey along the ages of her 30s through her 50s; the work is so fluid that the subject can be all of these ages interchangeably. For the most part, the eyes are opaque or made nonexistent by both broad and narrow cardboard strokes, or sometimes by a splash or rub of paint. When the cream-gold predominates, her likeness appears skeletal. She poses at angles to expose her mood, but in each frame her mouth—often with lips smeared scarlet—shifts with the slightest movement to reveal her character: sad, secretive, pained, or at ease.

Two portraits include an outlier element. Although just as engaging as the other ten compositions, the viewer is brought closer to the subject by Untitled 2 February 2017 and Woman & Cat. In Untitled 2, the woman is holding a bouquet of roses, her forehead and the first half of her eyes off-frame, with a thin line of white that stretches under her bottom lids.

Her lips are an untouched pink, and her expression is of grave resolve.

She is upright, facing straight on. She is being presented, it seems, with an unconventional bouquet of flowers that prick with thorns.

In Woman & Cat, she stands in the background, a spectator, with a thin cat in the forefront. The animal expresses both protectiveness and bewilderment. How dare anybody invade their space, even with only their eyes? The cat is speaking to us, for the woman who is dressed in black, is deep in focus elsewhere, a seeping dark cloud ominously poised in front of her.

For decades, Garden has consistently used her own portraiture as a self-reflective examination of a much wider universal discourse on the political sphere of womanhood.

She credits this awareness to tutor Vivian Lynn for instilling a feminist perspective during her formative years in the late 1970s. Garden’s new show is unapologetic and singular: she invites us to peek into the female experience. She speaks about mental illness, about menopause—exposing that halfway point of awe-inspiring but often shocking change of a woman’s body and emotions—and her place in the world.

Auckland

Louise McRae Unmonument

Grey, in association with Seed Gallery 7–18 August

BRONWYN LLOYD

Before visiting Unmonument at Grey in Grey Lynn, I read that the inspiration for the exhibition was a statue of King George V at the Matakana War Memorial, north of Auckland. The monarch is periodically beheaded by vandals and apparently McRae, a Matakana resident, prefers the statue in its headless state.

That single detail nicely sets up the idea uniting the whimsical assortment of stacked, perched and teetering sculptures here. If you think of McRae’s invented word, ‘unmonument’ as a verb, meaning the act of removing an object’s monumentality, then it is easy to see that the body of work is an exercise in stripping a sculpture