Also included are major paintings by Hanns Kuniztberger, Erin Lawlor and Todd Hunter and whilst the energy, pitch and tempo couldn’t be more contrasting, any dissonance will feel temporary.

Kunitzberger’s paints “volume”, its rise and dissipation with a sensitivity and feeling that is magical. Pigment gathers like grains of sound so that the interior of the painting has an amplitude and tone that is elemental. At the paintings edges sound evaporates into a hushed zone.

I regularly think of Lawlor’s paintings are meteorological. There is a swirling tumult in the accomplished brushwork that leads us headlong into the tempest.  Of course, such wild conditions are measured as much by their sonic qualities as they are by their moisture and velocity. The momentum that Lawlor builds in her painting, the air pressure can be almost giddying. This sensation alone feels “inner ear” as much as optic.

Todd Hunter paintings often have a spikey electricity to the gesture. The brushwork turns fast, pivoting and dancing through chromatically charged fields. Hunter paints to an edgy soundtrack, much of his studio given over to the delivery of surround sound and that’s what the paintings convey – an enveloping version of quadrophonic sensation.

Fox Jensen McCrory & Fox Jensen are enormously grateful to the artists for their enthusiasm and support for the project and we wish to make special mention of Andy Cowton and Patricia Bossio whose collaboration on the composition for Mark Francis’s Jericho.

Andrew Jensen, November, 2022

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“Before, when I didn’t know what colour to put down, I put down black. Black is a force: I depend on black to simplify the construction. Now I’ve given up blacks.” Henri Matisse

At the end of the 2021 we presented a beautiful exhibition called Raven in both the Auckland and the Sydney galleries. Each of the works followed Henry Ford’s much quoted dictum…”you can have it in any colour you want, as long as its black. And though both Knoebel and Roeth are widely celebrated for their profound engagement with colour, from time to time, each set it aside as they reach back as if to reorient themselves – Roeth more towards the final paintings of Reinhardt, Knoebel certainly back to Malevich. Whatever this process invites, it is not long before each is once again lassoed by the psychological, emotional & visceral allure of colour. Neither have or likely will ever abandon black as Matisse suggested he had, it’s just that like Hockney, most all of the time they “prefer living in colour”.

My working relationship with Winston Roeth stretches back to the tail-end of the 20th century – still feels odd to say that. We met in NYC in the mid 90s and it was and continues to be a revelatory connection – for Winston is the rarest painter of deep and compelling sensation, a painter who seems able to access colour’s truly magical capacities. More critically, without meeting him in 1995 it feels less likely I’d have met Imi Knoebel five years later, such was the epiphany I enjoyed in Roeth’s Broome Street studio, about where the gallery’s future lay.

Despite his seemingly strict adherence to borders and grids, geometry itself may, ironically, hold less interest. Looking at certain works, the grids especially, this may appear to be a perverse suggestion, but my feeling is that his employment of regular calculus allows Winston to stabilise the buoyancy and volatility of colour. He delights in the activity that the intersections can invite, the ‘op-ish’ animation that occurs as pigments double up and react to volume and speed – but perhaps such exacting architecture may be the only way that he can approach measuring the immeasurable.

Knoebel too uses geometry both logistically and expressively. Often his paintings are built out from the wall taking the form of an expanded matrix – thus colour gets opportunity to swell further as the construction of the object allows for its thickness and body. Knoebel is more inclined to jolt the orthogonal, destabilising the conformity of the grid so as to adjust and enliven it – as Mondrian demonstrated in the glorious New York City 1. Like Roeth, Knoebel doesn’t seek answers in mathematics. Such Formalism is a dead-end and neither would dare entertain such Calvinist restrictions when colour offers up such carnal pleasure.

In Deluxe both paintings by Winston Roeth comprise 24 stone slates. Each are essentially the same size with two holes through which nails fix them to the wall. Roeth selects his slates carefully – he has always been mindful about the supports he uses, having long ago abandoned the orthodox linen-stretcher combination. The surfaces of the slate have a flattened topography complete with gentle ravines and ridges that have telling implications for the way that pigment and light gather across this territory. The variegated edge of each slate heightens this activity as the iridescent qualities on his pigment become even more evident. The juxtaposition of colour has a nigh-on bebop jazziness to it, your eye moving around the grid in search of the next note. The gold grid is quieter, positively hushed by comparison. It works a tonal register…a little more Bob James than Bitches Brew.

Imi Knoebel’s Anima Mundi works have grown incrementally over many years to now feel like a profound statement of chromatic and symbolic intent in his broad and energetic practice. Harking back to the form and character of the Grace Kelly Portraits, these small vertical panels operate as single works and then gather into clusters of 2, 3, 4 & 5. As they gather, they assemble a glorious chromatic discord and funkiness. Like Roeth’s more bebop compositions, the eye is not invited to rest and be seduced by the calm of the monochrome. Knoebel’s playing is spikier, unexpected – we understand colour by contrast and collision.

However idiosyncratic these two wonderful painters’ exploration of colour is, it is a rare treat to see them in such close conversation. Such retinal pleasure feels especially welcome, and it seems Matisse was right…no surprise there…

AJ

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Coen Young knows this. Thus, he shrewdly leverages our abundant narcissistic urge simultaneously engaging and disrupting our gaze. Young’s ongoing series, however mirror-like, obstruct pure reflection through the glitches of material and contingencies of making. Whatever hope or chance we wished we had to glimpse ourselves in a tranquil pool, to even pretend that we are seeking anything other than our own appreciation, is undone by the veils of distortion that his wilfully faltering alchemy invites.

Selfie stick in hand, Narcissus would’ve got up and left long ago, in search of a new, more flattering reflecting pool. It’s not that Young’s mirrors don’t reward our attention, it’s just that they have long denied any obligation to adulate in this mutual exchange between object and viewer.
And in this culture that relentlessly, even voluntarily confuses recognition with understanding, Young’s faltering mirrors compel us to ask what it is that we see, what might we feel, what we can sense about ourselves, without the comfort of likeness and the dull amusement of self-absorption?
Good painting, like literature should and does make us curious – surely that is what Steinbeck sought – that by being curious we elevate our sentient selves, by being alert to the possibility of an unexpected encounter. On the face of it this seems like very little to ask for, but perhaps it is increasingly rare when the most common image we make, save and look at is of ourselves…or our dog…

– Andrew Jensen 

“I don’t care what you think unless it is about me.”– Kurt Cobain

Fox Jensen McCrory is thrilled to present six new works by Coen Young at the Auckland gallery. This is the third solo exhibition the gallery has presented of Young’s works. His work has also been included in Portrait Without a Face (Sydney/Auckland), The Authority of Death (Sydney/Auckland) and at Art Basel Hong Kong. Young’s work is held in collections around the world and most recently acquired by both the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. 

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The paintings of Callum Innes have long expressed his desire to use the practice of painting as an act of analogue accounting. Not one that simply seeks to define time but one that measures pressure and release, and evidences touch and persuasion of a material that might well resist or misbehave, given its own tenacious character. 

New paintings from Innes’s Oslo studio have joined a collection of works in Sydney, so as to make a beautiful exhibition where we can feel the gentle arc of time and studied progress that have defined this most consistent and celebrated painter.

– Andrew Jensen

Group and solo exhibitions 
Fox Jensen Sydney / Fox Jensen McCrory Auckland

Callum Innes, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2000  
Six Degrees of Separation, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2000  
There’s Joy In Repetition, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2004
C6 H10 O5 II, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2004
Lux, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2005
Callum Innes, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2005
Melancholia, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2005
C6 H10 O5 III, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2005
Points of Orientation, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2006
Detox, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2006
Headspace, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2007
Callum Innes, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2008
20/20, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2008
The Estrangement of Judgement
Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2009
E=MC2, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2009
Cimmerian Shade, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2010
Kelly Knoebel Roeth Innes Judd, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2010
Callum Innes, Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2011
E=MC2, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2011
Saturation, Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2012
C6H10O5 V, Fox Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2012
The Architecture of Colour, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2012
The Anatomy of Loss, Fox Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2013
The Architecture of Colour, Fox Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2012
Points of Orientation, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2013
Farben, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2014
A Discreet Vessel, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2016
A Discreet Vessel, Fox Jensen McCrory Gallery, Auckland 2016
Group Exhibition, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2018
Permafrost, Fox Jensen Alexandria, Sydney 2019

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My primary exploration is about light – light-marks in space or light-in-light, light in darkness, night-light, daylight, those kinds of things just intrigue me.

– Bill Culbert

Light, light, light, in the light

Light, light, light, in the light, ooh, yeah

Light, light, light, in the light

In the Light Led Zeppelin 1976

It’s lyrics like this that made me feel that stadium rock got all it deserved when the flash grenade of punk exploded in 1976 and reset the dial…I will confess that I’ve since become a somewhat hesitant revisionist of LZ and others but good grief…

Light has been something of an obsession in New Zealand’s shortish art history. Of course, New Zealand is not particularly special in that preoccupation but there is no doubt that there is an unrelenting bite to its quality. Whether one accepts the geographical determinism that was offered up as the driving force in so much sharply delineated painting in the 20th century or not, there is an experience of light and its capacity to throw the folds and ravines of Aotearoa into extraordinary relief, which if not unique, feels particular to New Zealand. Even New Zealander’s continue to be surprised by it – witness regular seasonal sunburn.

Bill Culbert’s practice is without question mediated by light. But rather than stay in New Zealand he spent much of his life living in France – Provence, the domain of Cézanne in particular, but more broadly the Impressionists. Whether it was the more atmospheric or poetic light that attracted Bill or that he shared McCahon’s sentiment that NZ was a “landscape with too few lovers” that drove him there. There was no doubt that his life and work would always be spread between two geographical poles, two landscapes, two differently illuminated worlds and that he seemed destined to happily straddle that distance and its accompanying contradictions.

Being with Bill’s works in recent times of course makes me hugely frustrated to have not spent more time in his company. As with the late Lawrence Carroll, an Antipodean/American painter who also chose the warm patinas of European light, we have joined forces rather too late. So, I find myself installing these unexpectedly poignant works at arm’s length with Claudia, lamenting his absence and sensing very much that the wry humour that surely accompanies any thoughtful disciple of Duchamp, would’ve been yet another enjoyable contradiction at the heart of this most intelligent and poetic artist.

– Andrew Jensen

Bill Culbert had his first solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1977 and participated in the first Auckland Triennial in 2001. In 2013 he represented New Zealand in the 55th Venice Biennale, with an installation entitled Front Door Out Back.  Permanently commissioned Culbert sculptures may be found in London, Wellington, and Auckland. Amongst his most notable collaborations were his explorations with Ralph Hotere (Te Aup?uri). With one of the most beloved, Fault, a rip of light, permanently installed on the façade of the City Gallery, Te Whare Toi, Wellington. 

He was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to art, particularly sculpture, in 2008. Bill passed away at his home in Provence in 2019, three years after this wife, British artist Pip Culbert. 

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My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.
Ad ReinMy painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.
Ad Reinhardt (1975) 
Art-as-art: the selected writings of Ad Reinhardt
 
The image of Ad Reinhardt peering into his own painting shows a cooler, 20th century version of Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Though it was not vanity that drew Reinhardt to search in the dark recesses of the pool… it was the reverse. 

For painting might grant us the opportunity to lose oneself in the “desert of the non-objective” rather than to locate one’s reflection so as to admire it.

When Rothko said that “a painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience”, he implied certain shared obligations for both the painting and its viewer.  That judgement is suspended in favour of feeling, that we allow an encounter with (his) painting to approach transcendence. The pursuit of this metaphysical state, something some painters have long wished to attend to was central to Rothko’s aspirations, as indeed it was to Malevich, to Turner and to Casper David Freidrich. These painters wished that painting might shoulder the burdens of theosophy, deliver the devotional clout of divinity and through their material depictions they may bring forth a “nonmaterial’, numinous episode.

I don’t think for a minute that any of the painters in Raven wish to emulate such cravings but what each of them do seem to seek is a distilled and open reception for work that speaks quietly and sincerely to a sensate register in us that has been reduced, subjugated by the clamour and white noise that popular culture fertilizes.

Most works have never been seen before and the gallery is enormously grateful to those artists who have quietly embraced this opportunity – so much so that Raven has taken on an extraordinary dimension and life of its own. 

– Andrew Jensen

The post NOVEMBER – RAVEN – ALEXANDRIA first appeared on Fox Jensen Gallery.

My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.
Ad ReinMy painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.
Ad Reinhardt (1975) 
Art-as-art: the selected writings of Ad Reinhardt
 
The image of Ad Reinhardt peering into his own painting shows a cooler, 20th century version of Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Though it was not vanity that drew Reinhardt to search in the dark recesses of the pool… it was the reverse. 

For painting might grant us the opportunity to lose oneself in the “desert of the non-objective” rather than to locate one’s reflection so as to admire it.

When Rothko said that “a painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience”, he implied certain shared obligations for both the painting and its viewer.  That judgement is suspended in favour of feeling, that we allow an encounter with (his) painting to approach transcendence. The pursuit of this metaphysical state, something some painters have long wished to attend to was central to Rothko’s aspirations, as indeed it was to Malevich, to Turner and to Casper David Freidrich. These painters wished that painting might shoulder the burdens of theosophy, deliver the devotional clout of divinity and through their material depictions they may bring forth a “nonmaterial’, numinous episode.

I don’t think for a minute that any of the painters in Raven wish to emulate such cravings but what each of them do seem to seek is a distilled and open reception for work that speaks quietly and sincerely to a sensate register in us that has been reduced, subjugated by the clamour and white noise that popular culture fertilizes.

Most works have never been seen before and the gallery is enormously grateful to those artists who have quietly embraced this opportunity – so much so that Raven has taken on an extraordinary dimension and life of its own. 

– Andrew Jensen

The post NOVEMBER – RAVEN – PADDINGTON first appeared on Fox Jensen Gallery.

Imi Knoebel is without question one of the great colourists of our time. In 2011 he was commissioned to make a set of stained-glass windows for Chartres Cathedral’s Saint Joseph and Sacré Coeur chapels. The first were a reparation gift from Germany to France and in 2015, Knoebel himself donated a further three windows to the Jeanne d’Arc chapel.

In Chartres, colour and light are given full opportunity to collude much in the same way that Matisse and Le Corbusier collaborated on the Rosary Chapel in Vence, Provence between 1947 and 1951.

Knoebel’s emblematic Anima Mundi works are collages that hark back to his early abstract Grace Kelly portrait paintings. Repeated rectangular forms sit at the margins of each portrait form, though the colour and the brushstrokes differ from one to the next. Knoebel’s use of iridescent pigments means that not only is the geometry of the form quietly “adjusting” but the depth of the painting shifts in relation to lights play on the pigment. 

Nikolic has quietly set about overturning chromatic norms. His paintings fuse seemingly impossible connections between colours that ought not to synthesize but they do. Not only are his paintings built upon collisions of colour and structure, but they have a deeper connection to historical painting, works that have moved him to respond. Pay the prophets is a full expression of his engagement with the esoteric colour theory the Seven Rays, and a respectful nod to Sassetta’s The Burning of Jan Hus, a Predella panel in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. The jazzy chromatic arpeggio takes your eye back and forth across its full length. 

For a brief time, Jan Albers was a frustrated painter, cramped by the requirements of painting for a neatly folded linen corner. On leaving the Dusseldorf Kunstakadémie, Albers also left more orthodox painting behind to occupy the space between the 2nd and 3rd dimensions. Albers relief works retain just enough sense of the picture plane, but they have sculptural form and thickness that means that colour, especially in these cast resin works, is animated by the way that light passes through the forms rather than way it plays upon it.

Bill Culbert, somewhat like Albers’, began his time as a painter but morphed into a sculptor, albeit one who like Dan Flavin and François Morellet would co-opt fluorescent light to transport colour and transform space. Much of Culbert’s work expressed an intersection between the tangible and the invisible. Familiar objects are punctured by light sources – a suitcase, a formica dining table, a chair – even low brow plastic bottles. The latter are transformed by the seemingly effortless marriage of PVC and a fluorescent tube into domestic versions of Knoebel’s Chartres Cathedral windows. 

Hello is a happy, celebratory exhibition. It could easily have been called Anima Mundi but that title was already in play.

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VIEW THE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE HERE

I am always conscious of this secret disruption in me
– Katherine Mansfield

Jane Bustin’s works can present themselves as straight-up, face on, unflinching, precise – shaped by Modernism’s call for clarity. Whilst there is an intriguing distortion and shimmer visible in the smaller copper sections where the polished surfaces snare fragments of light and ambient imagery, the greater proportion of these compositions have a highly stilled composure about them… until you move that is.

Once we are “off-centre” the edges of the panels are revealed and so we appreciate their depth and material character, as well as glimpsing unexpected slices of colour and discreet areas with feathery, stained touches. These attributes animate the shallow space Bustin’s constructions occupy and lend greater form and density to the object. Viewed obliquely we are also made aware of the first signs of disruption.

This activation is not just visual but deeply associative. The modernist formality that is signalled on first sight dissipates swiftly as the paintings’ composition encourages this more intimate, circular interview. These are paintings that invite curiosity, not just about their own constitution and their intention but about looking with an inquisitorial eye. 

The relationship to the genre of portraiture, not just the wondrous Artemisia Gentileschi Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, is clear and inescapable. I am also reminded of Imi Knoebel’s Grace Kelly portraits where colour and iridescence, proportion and adjustment insinuate character and disposition. By size and proportion, by volume, these paintings sit at the wall like graceful portrait paintings for whom the sitters’ character and dimension might only be revealed by inquisition and time. And like the best portraiture, like the very finest writing, they feel invested with memory and license. It is precisely these qualities that allow Jane to forge such a conversation with Katherine Mansfield and Artemisia Gentileschi.

So whilst we can look upon Jane Bustin’s paintings as being infused with a chromatic vocabulary that feels more European than antipodean there is something in the disruption of the picture plane, the unexpected modernity of the material choices that speaks to the new world as much as the old. This bridging of the old world with new was central to Katherine Mansfield’s capacity to evoke memory – both strong and strange and that desire and ability is what she shares with Jane Bustin.

These paintings will feel at home in New Zealand I know – their clarity and delicacy welcome, their reflection and intimacy unexpectedly familiar.

– Andrew Jensen 

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