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• Arabesques
The eye to
see and the skill to transform makes fine art, and three fine shows
this week illuminate this interaction.
T.J. McNamara, NZ Herald 25 April, 2006
Vanishing Point: Representing the Invisible at Starkwhite Gallery
T.J. McNamara, NZ Herald 13 September, 2005
Garden combines tight construction with individual style and/psychological penetration. She examines the domestic scene - an intersection of a letter with a strong still-life of roses uses a compositional device for symbolic purposes in Love Letter I and realism confronts anonymous idealism in Love Letter II. Such prosaic things as window-catches complete the composition and intensify the work in the Black Window series. All this linked to striking, almost iconic figures.
T.J. McNamara, NZ Herald 1 September, 2004
What can we use instead of that damnable word "interesting" for three fine exhibitions this week? All have recognisable people, animals, houses and scenes in them but art is always so much more than copying appearances; we need adjectives that will convey the special qualities the artist gives to these things. Perhaps we should adopt those the British painter Lucian Freud is said to have written over his studio door: "Urgent, subtle, precise, robust". Certainly there is a sense of urgency about two of the shows. Both Viky Garden and Bing Dawe convey the feeling they are anxious and need to give visual expression to their ideas. Viky Garden's Any Given Day is at the Judith Anderson Gallery until December 6. As usual her work is autobiographical. The figure that appears in all the paintings is a persona of the artist but also works symbolically as a generalised woman figure. The woman wears the same dress in all the paintings. It has a big check pattern like a tablecloth and on the checks are sprays of cherries which symbolise both fertility and loss of virginity or innocence. Another consistent feature is that the woman wears pink rubber gloves which suggest housework and gardening. The one painting in the show that does not have a figure in it is a still-life of these gloves. Symbols are all very well but they must be given an effective visual presence and Garden's figures have an extraordinary force as they act out their part in wide landscape settings. Rural II, the most powerful of all, has a strong base in the skirt and a neck like a column as it looks from the hills of a rural setting towards something like an apartment block on the horizon; torn clouds in the sky set the emotional tone. A broken fence is not only precise in the rural setting but also suggests broken barriers. As always with this artist there is an element of the bizarre, notably in Go Out and Play where shadows add to the drama. The housewife figure prances in gumboots, kicking a ball with the symbol of a major world issue on it. But immaculate white washing dancing like spirits on a clothesline marks a different, domestic world. At times the woman is joined with another. Splendidly, The Visitation links the present with the past with representations of Mary, the Mother of God, meeting Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. This acknowledgment of pregnancy is touching and solemn. Garden has gone through a long evolution. At each stage she has produced work that is curiously compelling and this visual expression of the emotions of mature women is completely convincing. TJ McNamara NZ Herald 18 November 2002
All art is born from the artist's experience and knowledge but some exhibitions draw more directly from the artist's life than others. With art as autobiography the trick is to make the images not only reflect the artist's life but also strike a chord with the viewers. Viky Garden's work at the Judith Anderson Gallery (until February 23) is not a narrative but a series of autobiographical feelings. In her paintings she uses a tall, female figure who is obviously the artist herself but also stands as an emblem or metaphor. The images are solemn and intent. From painting to painting the figure passes through a range of attitudes and emotions. It is questioning, commanding, asserting, accepting, saddened and, in one grim picture, made grey with despair. The attitudes of the figure are reinforced by a repertoire of images, particularly a series of tall structures that turn a blank face to the world except where they are pierced by a dark window. The mood is reinforced by wind-driven clouds in the background and by islands cut off by the innocence of the sea. Frequently in the background there is a tall stone plinth which inescapably locates the scene in Auckland and gives an upright, Apollonian, penetrating contrast to the foreground where the figures stand in the light. There is no exact meaning for the other objects that accompany the women. They obviously have an allegorical purpose in this theatre of life but it is a virtue of the painting that every viewer will be able to link them with their own feelings and meanings. In The Tub, the plinth stands on a distant hill. Nearer the foreground there is a chair, which works as a symbol of domesticity. Since the beginning of her career, Garden has been able to paint a chair and endow it with a significance beyond the commonplace. In this painting, too, significance is added by a big, empty tub and further intensity is given the work by the huge cat the woman holds. Its springy tail and muscularity convey instinctive action and energy. We are tempted to ask, will the cat be confined in the tub, washed in the tub, drowned in the tub? Nevertheless, this is not a narrative work but a work that conveys a sense of assertion and precarious control. Another strong work is a tall nude Venus. The pose is the attitude of the Venus Pudica - the Venus of Modesty, with the hands over the breasts and groin as in the reconstructed figures of antiquity. But this is modern woman and we are confronted with a triumphant, if bony, reality while paper dolls wind between her legs. In contrast there is Mercy, where the woman kneels, her face made grey with grief, her bust thin, her feet clad in clumsy, peasant shoes and, above her, driven clouds. September 11 comes to mind and subsequent war. This is not the single most powerful work in the show. It is a calmer, more tender work called Shelter, where there are three trees which, like the crosses on Calvary, cast long shadows. The woman in this painting has a complex expression of acceptance and holds a tiny, leafless sapling which might be bare but hints at possibilities of growth. With every exhibition Garden's idiosyncratic, demanding work grows in complexity. These deeply meditated paintings are at once splendidly executed and have a haunting, humanist depth. TJ McNamara NZ Herald 11 February 2002
This week, among the usual variety of work - there are several interesting exhibitions of still life. One is by Viky Garden at the Peters Muir Petford Gallery. The artist is best known for her portrayal of young women in emblematic roles. In this show she is portraying objects rather than people, although one of the remarkable qualities of the work is the suggestion of people among the objects that help to make up their lives. In the paintings, these objects - glasses, bowls, bottles and vases - are gently distorted to make them link into tightly organised compositions and to give them a tense, curious life of their own. These Cezanne-like, subtle shifts of shape can be seen in such things as the shoulders of the bottle in My Wine, a painting that also features transparent shadows which add to its intensity. TJ McNamara Perspective on Art, NZ Herald, October 2000
The eternal feminine is widely in evidence in Auckland this week and not jest in Stanley Kubrick's form-filled film Eyes Wide Shut. The most starkly autobiographical treatment of women is Contra-indication by Viky Garden at the Peters Muir Petford Gallery. This exhibition evokes the memory of the poem In Excelsis by Amy Lowell:
Each painting features a white vessel with a long neck and a full body as the symbol of eternal womanhood. The way in which the protagonist handles the jar with her long, pale fingers contributes to the extraordinary mood of each painting and the psychological attitude it conveys. The visual power of the work, which is considerable, is also in part due to the use of patterned fabrics in some works and landscapes in others. Against a bare landscape and a naked tree, in The Very Thing You Love, the woman swings the vase as if to break it. The feeling of decisive movement is emphasised by the swirl of the patterned material of her dress. In Tense (past, present, future) the woman is in repose and the vase is cuddled to her as she lies in bed, the tilt of her head recalling Christ, and the sheets spread like angels' wings. The whiteness of the figure is set off by the narrow straps of her nightgown and the whole given energy by the pattern of the bedspread. The paintings as a group have an astringency set by the acerbic face of the woman and the tension between subject and object, between the cradled vase and the nearby statue of motherhood, between the perilous poise of the vase and a bare tree out a window or a faded rose on a table. TJ McNamara Weekend Books and Arts, NZ Herald, October 1999
What is the secret that makes Viky Garden popular enough to sell well, and yet keep an undeniable intellectual strength? The answer is many layered. Her Office Wives exhibition at the Chiaroscuro Gallery has the direct humanist appeal of interesting characters. When we look at these paintings, we feel we know the women. They are recognisable individuals, and typical without being empty stereotypes. There are other more obscure resonances in the painting of which the viewer may not be consciously aware. Many of the figures are in the centre of the painting with their heads turned slightly and their hands in front of them, in a pose that recalls the most famous painting of all - Mona Lisa, of the Florentine housewife who became immortal. Like Leonardo, Viky Garden knows that expression lurks in the corners of the mouth and the eyes. But the corners of the mouths of these women, who are weeded to the office, do not have a Mona Lisa smile and are turned down in expressions of patient endurance and hidden frustration. The quiet misery of the lives of these women, identified as typists by patterns of shorthand that appear in the background, is most completely shown in Number 10, Death of a Shorthand Typist (I used to be so keen and bubbly). Further depth is added to the images because the artist is obviously using herself as a model and putting herself in a variety of roles. This process is well known in the famous photographs of modern American artist Cindy Sherman, but here the process is painterly. The self-identification is a confirmation of the reality of these situations, even though each character is different. The realities include the strong useful hands which may have spent a working life typing letters of no importance, the anonymous windows in the anonymous multi-storeyed blocks that form the background, and the curtains which signify the end of the scene when the working woman is replaced by, perhaps a younger, smarter more amenable version. There is a great deal of sadness in these images but also a lot that is touching and honest. The faces and figures are bounded by Garden's characteristically wiry line and no detail is shirked. Look, for instance, at the solid mass at the base of the neck in the only nude in the show Unit Measure, which is a mark of the hunching osteoporosis to come. This powerful human interest does not mean that formal strength is neglected in this fine exhibition. The colour and the patters of dresses, as well as tilted still life objects - a coffee cup or a glass of wine in the happy hour - all play their part in the tense rhythms that hold these paintings together and give them pictorial intensity. Yet, for all the formal excellence, it is understanding and sympathy that make this a remarkable show. TJ McNamara - On Show Perspective on Art, NZ Herald, November 1997
Vermeer lovers take note. If you are, like me, susceptible to the hypnotic world of the Dutch paintings, where serene women in starched linen bodices are caught attending to timeless interior rituals, Viky Garden's Office Wives may take your breath away. Where Vermeer's women exude a profound tranquillity, Garden's characters have inner poise that is both alluring and scary. Garden's subjects are always variants of herself. Here she has created a series of fictions based upon her day job, peopled by characters who go beyond the realms of self-portrait. As secretaries they are imposters, elegant and obedient to the point of seeming docile, yet behind the torpid powdered face, a potent anarchy reigns. Garden's theme are serially of anguish. Her sell-out shows Thin Disguise, last year's Sisters of Mercy, and now Office Wives are testimony to frail, yet determinedly stylish, women. Office Wives strikes the themes pointedly. It's the pettiness, the menial tasks, the surface stickiness of the office banter, "have a nice day", "you're welcome", that contrived up-tempo chirpiness that is so utterly deadening. Garden takes shorthand and strews it like mysterious hieroglyphics across her canvas. The buildings are those of Le Corbusier of Bauhaus Europe, a clue to the artist's European roots. These are not the secretaries of the electronic age but those of Garden's schooling, where she spent hours in the top storey of an old brick building with 30 other girls in her class, battering away at ancient typewriters. A central image titled Curtains, portrays a 40-ish woman, an obvious recipient of a redundancy letter, bravely summoning a dignified facade. Her fate is perhaps that of the shorthand-typist. In the coup of the show, Happy Hour, a woman braces herself against the slipstream of conversation that races past her in this supposedly upbeat affair, while she struggles to find a point of entry. In another cloyingly familiar and large scale work, Office Politics, two women in sordid conspiracy, with coffee cup about to spill, are about to "dish the dirt". And while there is a weight to the paintings that make them appear serious, they are also whimsical, almost funny. In Wanted: A Sunny Disposition the lips are puckered to the point of distortion, while Death of a Shorthand Typist (I used to be so keen and bubbly) has Marilyn Monroe overtones, which suggest her personality type may be the blueprint for the ultimate secretarial persona. Jacquie Clarke Sunday Star Times November 1997
In the sell-out exhibition, Sisters of Mercy by Viky Garden at the Chiaroscuro Gallery, some of the most striking paintings have in the background agitated pieces of linen swept by turbulent breezes. They evoke the striking first line in Elizabeth Smither's poem, The Feast of All Saints, where she talks of "napery in heaven's wind". All the paintings have the same face, the head adorned with a scarf with tails that stream in the wind. The breeze blowing through the work is a very effective symbol for emotional agitation. Against this agitation is set the monumentality of the torsos, the hands and feet making ambiguous gestures that are half threatening and half blessing. This fertile ambiguity is particularly apparent in Games We Play, where there are two heads, a protagonist and her alter ego whose hands create an intricate play of forms with the middle and index finger clamped together and the thumb cocked as a child makes a pistol or a bishop makes a blessing. The quality of the painting makes potent the sandalled foot, the twisted toes, the sculptural thigh. At first these paintings appear very similar but there is a lot of difference between Tender Mercies, which combines a hint of prayer with more than a hint of defensiveness, and the fretful mood of Unrest where the agitated dreams of the sleeper are figured in the floating linen above her. The pattern of the blanket contributes its own weight to this complex and disturbing painting. The key work is There is No Peace, There is No Freedom, which shows a figure in front of a bare plain and emphasises that these women, though they have a majestic presence, are tense and embattled. They are not icons, they are real. TJ McNamara - Wednesday Arts, NZ Herald, August 1996
There is coherence in the exhibition of the work of Viky Garden at the Chiaroscuro Gallery because all the 20-odd paintings are self-portraits. Yet there is plenty of variety because each painting, in its tight, claustrophobic way, conveys a particular emotion or state of mind. They range from the artist as Queen Vic, complete with crown and royal smirk, to the artist as Miss Havisham, in the weird painting, The Heart Wants What It Wants. All these faces verge on caricature. They are done with Garden's characteristic twisting, writhing line and some are completed by equally characteristic knobbly hands. The moods of the faces are complemented by a wonderful variety of hats, which also give an added frisson to composition which could easily have become monotonous. The hats have a particular flourish in After LizzieÕs Visit and the amusingly pompous Vanity Bag. In Me As I Am the hat becomes like the MedusaÕs snake-hair. This witty, astringent, idiosyncratic show is sharp and unsentimental and in its own way full of delightful, intriguing painting. TJ McNamara - Perspective on Art, NZ Herald, August 1995 A Thin Disguise, the art of Viky Garden - Art New Zealand magazine Number 77/Summer 1995-96
In a world where women are constantly bombarded by changing images of the ideal body, it is no surprise that many women suffer from a low self-esteem about the way they look. Viky Garden's exhibition of predominantly nude self-portraits, True Life Studies, which recently showed at Chiaroscuro Gallery in Durham Lane were precisely that, true life studies, if a little grotesquely distorted through the artistÕs own perception of herself from looking in the mirror. Garden's portraits do not betray any feeling of low self-esteem. In these paintings she often isolates an area of the body, the rest cut off by the frame to leave her legs dangling or stomach tensing before us. When we do see the eyes, like these body parts, they seem to gaze provocatively at the viewer with a confident ambivalent stare as if to sternly command us to observe the beauty of the body as it "is" not as we are told it should be. An evaluation of Garden's work like this would not be possible if the work itself was not of a high standard. Garden has a talent with the brush and an eye for colour where the shades and tones of the body are a subtle decorative patterning like the bruises on an apple. In a work such as In The Time Of Sleep this decoration echoes the pattern of a sheet in the background, yet this abstraction still manages to convey the real undulations of the body. The figures are never completely anatomically correct, they are awkward and gangly and, as the artist describes, suggest the "sensitivity of a time in space". These self portraits are, however, very beautiful and carry much more of the "feeling" of the body than any close-up in a medical journal could provide. We are made strongly aware of the power of body language. In Early Morning Lippy the face has a vulgarity, as it is screwed up before the mirror and the garish red lipstick is held like a weapon in one hand. In Ashley the artist has turned her mirror on a male subject and the differences in feel to her self-portraits are intriguing. Here we see a headless torso and thighs languishing luxuriously across the canvas. This depiction is closer to the classical and erotic male model stereotype. The body seems to welcome our eyes rather than disturb them. The success in composition and confidence of this piece suggests Garden may succeed equally well with figurative studies other than herself. Garden has been less successful with her isolation techniques with objects. In Empty Chair and My Blue Chair the objects have been given similar distortions, almost appearing to have buckled under the weight of the artistÕs feelings at the time, which brings reminiscences of the work of Van Gogh. They remain awkward and indeed rather "empty" in content and the compositions feel clumsy. Only when the chairs are sat upon in the other portraits do they really come to life. And If I Row is an earlier work of GardenÕs which was brought out on an easel to complement the show. This work is superb, apart from the fact that, like many other young local artists, it betrays too strongly the influence of Fomison in its moodiness and biblical feel. Here, like in the later works, the background is flat and solid but is given a jewel-like blue which attracts rather than detracts us from the figures passionately rowing for an unknown destination. Mark Amery - Galleries, Sunday Encore, September 1994 EXHIBITIONS
Solo Exhibitions
The artist retains copyright of the image as a condition of sale
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