The Arrow (2024)

Tony Lane’s enigmatic iconography, distinctive colour palette and metaphysical symbolism contains recognisably New Zealand motifs and landscapes. All at once playful, with echoes of primitivism and use of plural imagery, it has always stood apart from, if not outside, the more fashionable nationalist narratives so dominant in New Zealand art. Resisting casual interpretation, his works are complex, the symbols elusive and multi-faceted. With In Dreams (2000), Tables with Flowers (2008) and Landscape with Shields (1998) human presence is powerfully implied, objects venerated, the natural, spiritual and dream-worlds cohabitating.

Freeman White’s celebratory, assuredly delivered alpine landscapes are directly contrasted by Natchez Hudson’s mixed media works. Hudson turns the genre inside out by inserting geometric forms and planes of flat colour. Two significant palette-knife infused geometric abstracts by J S Parker reference the Marlborough landscape. The mutability of light, sky and land add additional elements into the complex conversation about how a landscape is represented, interpreted and experienced.

Toss Woollaston’s modernist landscapes changed the way New Zealanders saw art and themselves. His goal was to present contemplative, emotional responses, animated by feelings of immediacy, delivered with a unique interplay of rhythms and forms. Pa Hill and House (ca 1970) and Mt Arthur from Gardiner’s Valley (ca 1950) are commanding, authoritative and meditative oil paintings. In contrast, the watercolours – clearly more gestural in nature – are visual narratives of emotions and sensations.

Amanda Gruenwald’s organic paintings, ranging in scale, colour, and form, are fluid, open-ended and expressively energised. Musical in nature, with surfaces layered through pooling and spreading, and with delicious interior dynamics established, Gruenwald elicits profound moments of meditation from the viewer while recognising the canvas as an object in itself.

The Arrow 2024 also includes new paintings from Karl Maughan, new ceramics from acclaimed Māori clay artist Baye Riddell and an outstanding suite of recent Paul Dibble sculptures.