A Meditation on the Non-Objective

Rosebank Road is a place of enterprise and purpose.

Trucks roll endlessly along the snaking tarmac strip, hauling materials and goods to warehouses, factories and ports. Bakeries and lunch bars are dotted amongst the workshops, serving low-key fare to the endlessly active workers who occupy the area by day. This industrial zone occupies most of a peninsula that juts out from Avondale, Auckland, between the Whau river and the inner reaches of the Waitematā harbour. This is perhaps an unusual environment for an exhibition of paintings and artworks. Nevertheless, such an exhibition took place in March.

Nestled between a steel fabricator, an electrical engineering business and a nutritional product enterprise is a repurposed industrial workspace—once an offset printing facility, now the studio of senior painter Stephen Bambury. The exhibition, titled , saw the studio transformed into a showroom, presenting Bambury’s work alongside that of fellow artist John Bailey. Where Bambury’s work was postindustrial, seeing metal plates used as painting support and construction material, Bailey showed framed works on paper. These material differences accentuated the visual dialogue between the work of the two artists. Both engaged non-objective content—materiality, colour, form—yet