Hipkins’ Painted Block Images
Block Units
Gavin Hipkins, Block Painting XXV, 2016.
Gavin Hipkins
Starkwhite, Auckland
14 November - 8 December 2018
Reviewed for EyeContact by John Hurrell
An exhibition with two parts—framed photographs of vertically stacked, painted children’s blocks on the wall, and a revolving carrousel of slides projected on a screen tucked into a large boxlike room deftly constructed in the space—this show continues to explore themes seen in Gavin Hipkins’ previous solo exhibition at Starkwhite three years ago.
This time the variously-sized wall photographs are alluding to sculpture as well as painting, to artists like Brancusi who explored the totemic and the vertical, as well as (in the earlier show) planar painting minimalists like Kelly or early Marden—but rejecting an industrial surface and celebrating paint as viscous substance with caked-on, icing-like layers.