Trish Clark Gallery is delighted to present Solid Colour: Part II, a group show in two parts. Situated on either side of Phil Dadson’s solo exhibition Sound Anatomy (presenting his recent projects from the Venice Biennale and Kassel), Solid Colour brings together artists whose work across painting, sculpture, installation and video shares a highly nuanced understanding of colour.
Solid Colour: Part I presented Galia Amsel’s structural cast glass works alongside powerful early works by Stephen Bambury, while Helen Calder’s poured paint skins created sculptural forms, playing against the sometimes soft, sometimes murky slippages of colour in Marie Le Lievre’s paintings. Bambury’s pivotal No.38 (After Kave), 1982 (seen in his 1999 – 2000 retrospective at City Gallery, Wellington, and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki and travelling exhibition Seven Painters: The Eighties), formed a key starting point for Solid Colour: Part I. Two paired but not identically-sized panels, densely painted, form colour fields that bleed slightly where they meet, creating a porous and contingent relationship. On the exterior of the gallery, Shannon Novak responded directly to the building’s architecture in a bold site-specific intervention that now forms a bridge to Solid Colour: Part II, along with Helen Calder’s remarkable pure paint hanging skins that create compelling sculptural space.
The evolution in the sensibility of Bambury’s recently completed works in Part II is evident in the dense, opaque paint paired with shimmering translucence or reflective solids, along with textured rust works that create colours not just with pigments, but with iron filings and chemical actions. Solid Colour: Part II revisits Phil Dadson’s striking 2014 January Music works, rendering sound visible in inky strokes, while Andrea Juan, in her introduction into the gallery, responds to the aural, visual and ecological conditions of Antarctica in a video work entitled Red. The silky, biomorphic washes of Amanda Gruenwald’s large-scale paintings announce this emerging talent’s entry into the gallery, and sit companionably with works by senior artists Bambury and Dadson. Chris Corson-Scott, whose solo exhibition in December last year was a markedly mature gallery entry, completes Solid Colour: Part II with an intimate portrait of his father – a deeply affecting and insightful glimpse into Ian Scott’s studio, a place few were granted entry to in the artist’s lifetime.
