Unravelled

In 1968, American sculptor Robert Morris coined the term ‘anti form’ to distinguish a new kind of sculpture that had emerged in reaction to the rigour and rectitude of minimalism. Where minimalism stressed composition and organisation, the new art preferred decomposition, disorganisation.

In place of strict geometries, Morris, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Lynda Bengalis, and Barry Le Va draped, poured, and scattered stuff. Their work emphasised material, mutability, process. Unravelling brings together five artists who operate out of this tradition, embracing disorder and irregularity.

The regular grid is a modernist staple. However, Melbourne’s Kerrie Poliness and Hawkes Bay’s Martin Poppelwell make their grids irregular. For her wall drawing, Poliness estimates the starting points by eye, so her grid expands and contracts.

Drawn from the top to the bottom of the wall, her it feels unequally stretched across the architecture. While her grids are drawn with sharp ruled lines, Poppelwell’s are hand painted, with a dirty line. His distressed, holey grids suggest abraided frayed textiles, albeit rendered in stark graphic contrast.

Wellington artist Kirsty Lillico became known for cutting shapes—derived from the floorplans of modernist buildings—from bits of old carpet, hanging and draping them in ways that countered modernist rectitude. She continues to make works from old carpet, allowing shapes fold and flop sculpturally.

Isabella Loudon, also from the capital, soaks twine in cement and hangs it out to cure, so the curves—informed by gravity—set. Her work explores the graphic and sculptural possibilities of this procedure. Shapes are inverted and combined. Her works lean against the wall, hang from hooks like rotting cadavers, or form miraculous upstanding architectures.

Peter Robinson presents small metal works: a mound of metal shavings is haunted by its likely prior state as a rectangular block; bent wires are crumpled like a fur ball; and wire offcuts of different lengths, gauges, and colours are scattered randomly. The Auckland artist makes us sensitive to varieties of irregularity.