GROUP SHOW

The 2013 Christmas Group show introduces Two Rooms’ new artists, Gretchen Albrecht and Boyd Webb, alongside the work of five established senior NZ artists.

With no prescribed medium or theme, there is nonetheless an emphasis on both formal and physical qualities – abstract geometries and rhythmic patterns of proportion, scale, shape, line, colour, and texture. Cinematic in scale, the work shares a rich visual palette that relates to the physical world as much as the artists internal landscapes.

Gretchen Albrecht’s new work combines a sensuous colour palette with geometry, continuing the artist’s investigation into the endless possibilities of abstraction. A fluid, roughly oval-shaped vortex with two slender horizontal geometric lines, bleeds out towards the edges of the rectangular linen canvas. The oval, a recurring formal motif, maintains continuity with the artist’s earlier paintings.

The tactile quality of the work with its assured swirling brushstrokes resonates with allusions to the inward sense of order and underlying rhythms of nature, creating work that revels in the joy of painting.

Stephen Bambury’s paintings have an aesthetic dialogue between content of form and the history of iconography with the materiality of the subtle and luminous surfaces.

These paintings are as concerned with re-presenting the history of nonobjective art as with their potential for meditation and philosophical speculation.

The works in the exhibition also investigate Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s phenomenology of colour, in particular transparency and the colour white. Transparent quadrangles hover enigmatically over the vertical and horizontal bars of the simple geometric form of a single white cross on a white plane.