At the Hamish McKay Gallery, MARK AMERY connects the dots at the One god, no masters group show.


YOU’VE GOT to love the nonchalant swagger of the current contemporary art scene. A pose that says “whatever” with a grin when questioned about art historical origins and allegiances.

It’s not that young artists don’t care, they just don’t necessarily feel shackled to any particular church-like movement or creed. As a slogan theirs is not McCahon’s giant signature “I AM”, it’s more Australian Geoff Newton’s small painting of “I AINT” – currently propped up on a window sash in Hamish McKay Gallery, like a ‘closed’ sign in a bookshop window.

‘Whatever’ and ‘I aint’ both appear as slogans in group exhibition one god, no masters. They reflect how most of us these days choose to live our lives, and what we choose to believe in in asserting a pick and mix of individual influence and a complexion of our interests – a hybrid of high, popular and community in cultural origin. This is art interested in encouraging different individual experiences; in raising questions rater than making statements. Check all assumptions at the door.

One god, no masters is an ambitious dealer show curated by Hamish McKay Gallery and new Melbourne dealer Neon Parc, bringing together 17 mostly emerging artists from Auckland, Wellington, Sydney and Melbourne. Featuring some exceptional artists, most showing in New Zealand for the first time, this is a rare opportunity to take the pulse of an emergent Australasian scene. It brings within its fold artists who’ve been played a major part in important new project spaces on both sides of the Tasman, from Bus Gallery and Gertrude Street in Melbourne, to Rm 103 and Special in Auckland and Enjoy and Show in Wellington.

Geoff Newton of Neon Parc wouldn’t have been able to miss the huge ‘I AM’ of McCahon’s ‘Victory Over Death 2’ at Australia’s National Art Gallery while at art school in Canberra. A shift to Melbourne’s anything goes scene must have felt like an ‘I aint’ kind of liberation.

With 25 works in one small gallery I expected this exhibition to suffer all the weaknesses of the ‘suitcase show’ full of small unfamiliar work – for it to be too much of too little, too soon. Sure, it would have been great to have seen the large abstract wall paintings Nöel Skrzypczac is known for (rather than a small work on canvas), or Damiano Bertoli’s grand sculpture (rather than a collage), yet this exhibition’s saving grace is its astute curation, finding strong threads between disparate small work that come out of complementary contemporary art scenes.


Skrzypczac and Bertoli mark out two threads to this exhibition. With Skrzypczac it’s a return to the joy of actively working with paint as a seductive material (in form, texture and colour) capable of visceral reactions, and painting and drawing generally as media able to be mercurial in their references. With Bertoli there is also a slippage across space and time, but it’s provided through a collaging of cultural reference points. The found cultural signifier is everywhere in this exhibition, and the mood is celebratory. Unabashed fantastical, romantic visions are back in fashion and are in full flower in all their glorious hothouse hybridity here.

A central work thematically are Marco Fusinato’s sets of vinyl LPs. Fusinato draws onto the surface of records, so that on a turntable the needle follows this new gouged groove, skipping across tracks like other artists here skip across musical, art and popular graphic history. Bertoli’s ‘Continuous Movement: Sadie’ seems almost a direct response to this work in this context. Presented behind glass is the white gatefold sleeve of the Beatles’ White Album. Collaged onto it are a couple walking into a vector mapped space, as if into the sexually liberated territory the album promises.

One of the real pleasures of one god, no masters is its embrace of joy and sensation. Newton’s other work ‘NY Robot’ is a muscular organic landscape painting, layered and folded like a strangled pile of laundry – not so dissimilar from a Rob McLeod. Yet like Caroline Johnston’s superb work next to it, it’s full of fantastical dream shifts.

This exhibition is full of lush verdant growth, landscapes sprouting out of cultural memory in constant states of transience, eluding definition. Viv Miller’s small mixed media works are surreal, captivating psychological landscapes full of spooky, spindly branches and dripping bright colour wheels. Courtenay Lucas ‘Cave’ is a nice photographic addition. Picturing a dark concrete tunnel beneath a profusion of different plants, we are seduced into a humid space where reality and fantasy are smudged together.


Best of all, Irene Hanenbergh’s prints on aluminium take the airbrush-gothic of the ‘70s and create powerful mystical storms out of the movement of shaggy hairdos. Working digitally, she finds magic in the machine, the work shape-shifting between Iron Maiden imagery and Nordic mythological illustration to find a true life force of its own. Like so many of these artists she manages to provide beauty, truth and irreverence all at once.

The same goes for Marnie Slater. With the psychedelic candy-coloured marbling of her ‘Whatever Painting’ Slater gives us a happy shrug, but all the same leaves much to savour and think over. It’s nicely matched in the next room with a colourful collage on found paper by Australian Matt Hinkley.

There’s often the sense with this exhibition that a group of artists have left behind their production and detritus from one big art party, complete with scratches on the host’s vinyl. Long may the joy be this infectious.

one god, no masters, Hamish McKay Gallery, until November 2