Anyone who knows the presentation standards demanded by Mrkusich and now executed by his son Lewis can only stand back in awe at a small regional museum taking on such a massive challenge. The gallery spaces have been remodeled and painted to within an inch of their lives. You can still feel Lewis Mrkusich pacing up and down, pointing out imperfections and obsessively checking measurements. In this case there was the added complication of making a tightly specified architectural space so that Mrkusich's paintings could be placed in the arrangement he had imagined.
Sometimes elaborate installations like this are created as permanent sites, those out-of-the-way destinations of art pilgrimage that the rich and the obsessed trek to throughout the world. But here in NZ, on 31 January 2015, these works will be taken down, packed up and probably never again be seen as an entity outside these few months in the Wairarapa.
Image: Milan Mrkusich installation inspiring a new interest in formal abstraction
