John Hurrell – 19 September, 2024

In two adjacent galleries upstairs at Te Uru we find a dazzling display of Pick’s ink, smoke and other media drawings on paper, interspersed with the occasional painting. Raw, energetic, restlessly investigative, and rife with casual risk-taking, this impressively grunty exhibition is full of startlingly diverse surprises.

With a subtle title that is slyly earthy (in the tradition of great women blues singers like Bessie Smith and Victoria Spivey) Pick depicts mainly single female figures and the occasional clasping hetero couple. As drawings made on pages of studio workbooks these images are often deliciously messy (at times embracing chance) yet also with others that are precise and articulate, referencing a wide range of interests from Buddhist meditation schemata to well-known works by Rodin or Dali.

Personally I much prefer Pick’s drawings and studies to her final paintings, many of which irritate because of a tweeness admirably not detectable in her preparatory studies on paper. Usually in the canvas works she loses a fluidity and an awkward stiffness takes over. However in the works on paper their looseness and wide use of liquid media is what makes them so exhilarating, coupled with their occasional linear exactitude and complexity. She rocks back and forth between the two: one more successful than the other.

Spaced throughout the gallery walls are large paint-agitated bannerlike strips on which rest smaller blindlike rectangles. On these even smaller works are placed, so that the illusory space—though regular—stays unpredictable; with a vague pulse with spaced apart vertical accentuations. While there are a handful of oil paintings on canvas, most of the works are exploratory studies on paper (using ink, pencil, watercolour, candle-smoke and gouache). Plus a few ceramics that are tasty collaborations with Jaime Jenkins.

Pick’s oblong strips (with folded corners) seem to have a clever conversation with the gallery ceilings and floors: the triangular slices near the walls with the former, and the ventilation grilles on the floor for the latter. In some ways they might be seen as a furtive and witty architectural critique that is vaguely Apple-esque. (And so the fascinating question arises: who did the hang? Pick, Gatt, or someone else?)

However aside from tangential speculations the drawings are the twinkling stars of this presentation. They are exquisite and well worth a trip to Titirangi to investigate.

John Hurrell

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