New Vision Gallery, Auckland
Perhaps more than the native-born New Zealander, the migrant artist successfully and perspicaciously fuses Maori and pakeha culture as evidenced in Alan Gilderdale’s recent exhibition at Auckland’s New Vision Gallery. [The] artist’s life adds up to a completely European cultural background; yet, Alan Gilderdale’s 22 untitled pictures in oil, gouache, mixed media and charcoal, all use Maori motifs with the emphasis on characteristic black, white and reddish brown.
Symbols and shapes draw on the spiral forms of Maori carving and unrolling punga fronds. Some suggest a melon’s splendidly curved plumpness; all evoke, without imitating, natural forms. They coil against large areas of colour suggesting space but not emptiness. These range from bright blues to dark greens and subdued greys with an occasional startling switch to orange and tomato. Brushwork always remains steady, balanced. Quiet, restful like New Zealand itself, some of these paintings become almost as impersonal as a machine with mimeograph ink in its veins.
Alan Gilderdale describes them as subjective responses to a new environment, to the New Zealand landscape, light exotic foliage, clear atmosphere and to the impact of Polynesian, even Australian Aboriginal, art. Certainly, they awaken an awareness of a culture taken for granted, even ignored, although the only genuine one this country has. Learned by osmosis but seen through a newcomer’s eyes, these traditional motifs gain a new dimension.
Molly G. Elliott, Art & Community, Vol. 6, No. 9. September 1970.
Sometimes it happens at an exhibition that while the main pictures on display are admirable in their way, the really exciting picture is in some small work tucked away in an obscure corner of the gallery. This is the case with the exhibition of work by Alan Gilderdale which opened last night at the New Vision Gallery. In the entrance foyer, outside the main gallery, is a screen print (No. 25) in which the colour harmony is deeper and richer than in any of the paintings. In this graphic image, too, the forms make a pattern of a complexity equal to those in the paintings and the clearly defined parallel lines, which are a prominent part of Gilderdale’s work, fit more easily.
The big paintings are quiet, subdued and correct. They have a formal academic approach; they take the elements of colour and form that have impressed the painter since his arrival in New Zealand, and work them into tidy patterns which have a good decorative quality. In the best of them, such as No. 11, a tumbled group of organic forms suggesting worm and fern shapers are imposed on a background of grey beyond which is a deep space indicated by areas of white and black. Other good works, such as No. 6, have some rather agitated brushwork in the foreground and sometimes, as in No. 14, landforms in the background. These work are superior compositions since they show a better sense of space than pictures that are simply a flat pattern. In many pictures the organic forms are arbitrarily curtailed in an unnatural way that alienates our emotional sympathy.
The whole exhibition shows a carefully developed taste and sound training; it is never less than nicely decorative but there is an absence of a driving idea that would give power to the show as a whole.
TJ McNamara, NZ Herald, February 17, 1970.