Social distancing with art perfect

What is one metre? What is two? And, should I enter that lift? Feeling the warm moisture of our own breath in our face masks, right now we’re all negotiating our bodies in relation to space in far more conscious, radical ways.

The good news is there’s never been a better time to go to a gallery. As indoor public spaces go, most feature small numbers of people in generous spaces. Meanwhile, standard gallery etiquette sees social distancing already practised. Unless it’s the Mona Lisa, crowding is frowned upon.

In a last magnificent suite of exhibitions orchestrated by now-former senior curator Robert Leonard at City Gallery (a result of the unfortunate Experience Wellington restructure) large works are, elegantly, given breathing room. It’s as if the imprint of form and movement is being balanced and emotionally weighted by the surrounding vacuum.

A Pierre Huyghe film-work (apt title: The Human Mask) is cast widescreen across an entire gallery wall, the pitchblack space before it the size of a sizeable apartment. Four people may enter at a time. I was there alone.

Over his tenure Leonard has given filmwork rare and welcome amounts of space.

Also upstairs the exhibition theme of Action Movie is matched by room to let your body move to painter Judy Millar’s strokes. Go on. The exhibition centres on a set of gestural abstract 2020 paintings, that demonstrate she is ever bolder and sinuous in making things move with depth up large. Whipping across the walls as its own form of moving image or text, Millar has made this mode her own.

Leonard smartly matches these with screenings of seminal gestural abstract painting directly onto celluloid by Stan Brakhage (1987’s The Dante Quartet and Len Lye (1957’s All Souls Carnival). There are also films of iconic performance works in which artists paint with bodies as brushes. In this central room seven paintings writhe and connect like synapses sparking, or spindly limbs snapping and twisting. They might also make you curl inwards, to reflect on your emotional turns.

At Millar’s dealer, Robert Heald Gallery upstairs in Left Bank, large works are also given plenty of space. At first glance, the forms crawling over large rectangular

padded mats on the walls in Emerita Baik’s The softest place on earth might be spiky coronavirus cells, or cartoon clubs from The Flintstones. They’re actually based on

the magic clubs of Dokkaebi, goblin-like creatures from Korean folklore, which can summon things, acting like magic wands.

Baik’s works are smart fabric collages, stitching together different rich textures from cushioning, clothing and bedding into abstract expressive hybrids where paint is splattered and sprayed as wildly coloured grids (Lye and Brakhage are not bad references). Baik works with great visual intelligence in the play of colour and form mapped over one other. A distinctive combination of sculpture and painting, the body is evoked as something lain with, softly rolled and beaten. It’s a rich companion to Judy Millar.

Dokkaebi were known to take spiritual possession of inanimate household or discarded objects, and Baik finds a way to combine fabrics in funny but poignant abstract ways, as if threads of life in a rich primordial swamp. The clubs move across the surfaces like amoeba, animated by paint.

Weekend Must-See

There’s a Trevor Moffitt painting in the office at {Suite} Gallery on Upper Cuba St (until October 2). A Kiwi forester sits slumped, his back to us, sharpening his axe.

While the bush behind is all trunks and a curtain of greens, the tree stump he sits on looks like a slab of meat.

Likewise his body is made out of warm slashes of colour, all nape, rounded shoulders and elbows, rough cuts of clayish colour. The man is a study in solitude, as crestfallen as the curve of his back, as hopeful as the axehead’s gleam. As soft as his instrument is sharp. It’s a different kind of moving image.

Moffitt passed away in 2006. His raw narrative painting with its attention to social history, sits awkwardly in the art historical trajectory and deserves far more attention, especially in the North Island – a survey would be sensational.

With Moffitt, there’s a rugged yet refined expressive poetry in paint, with particular care for the pathos of a story, bringing Pa¯ keha¯ rural history to life.

Two solid landscapes here don’t really escape well from comparison with Toss Woollaston, but there are also five extremely fine works from the 51 paintings in Moffitt’s series about mass murderer and West Coast farmer Stanley Graham. Our Ned Kelly Series you could say. The works are remarkable in both their rendering of both violence and empathy through paint. There’s a rare humanity, taking us inside the emotional whirl of the subjects. In George S Ridley Attempts to Disarm Graham, four fists wrestle with a rifle that, visually, divides the painting top to bottom, landscape and bodies on either side all in one muscular motion.

When and where

■ Action Movie, Judy Millar, until October 31 ■ The Softest Place on Earth, Emerita Baik, until October 16