Wednesday, May 06, 2009

An exhibition of prints


You may have noticed our (small) ongoing thing for art and shoes. We once considered constructing a chart to track the increasing quality of curator/dealer shoes against a decline in artist footwear over the past ten or so years, but there were too many variables so now we’re sticking with anecdote.

Shortly after we put up our Auckland Art Fair shoe alert we dropped into Gambia Castle for Andrew Barber’s latest exhibition. You can see some images on the Gambia Castle home page, and shortly on Andrew’s section of it here. The paintings continue Barber’s wrestle with abstraction, but for us the horizon line won this particular skirmish. Show these paintings in the US and the idea of landscape probably wouldn’t even come up, but here it is very hard to avoid.

While preparing the space for the show Barber had sanded the ceiling and the effect of the soft coat of white plaster on the floor was so strange he decided to leave it. As people walked in they left behind them the traces of their soles, summoning up the ghost of Andy Warhol’s Dance Diagram paintings from 1962.
Images: Footprints at Andrew Barber’s Gambia Castle show