Gavin Hurley / Auckland's brand of art flourishing

26 July 2007 - The New Zealand Herald - T. J. McNamara

Posted: 26 July 2007 -

[Gavin Hurley] takes faces, simplifies them, and makes witty icons. At the same time he plays fashionable ironic games with questions of style and technique.

The wittiest is 'Pirate and Pussycat', in which an 18th-century seaman, quite handsome with bristling moustaches, is matched with a cat, small and sweet with bristling whiskers.

Games are played with collage, exactly cut but used so the image looks like painting by numbers or silhouettes from the past. Yet the real image of the exhibition is not matters of technique but the faces, which are stylised, impassive stereotypes.

Paradoxically, the best of them achieve a sense of character, too. 'Oh Dastard' is the image of an 18th-century toff, all curling hair and sideburns, but there is a hint of a theatrical, poetic personality. Hurley is not so good when he portrays women while making ironic comments on mother love where the people are horses and using the shape of the hairstyle as the principal way of suggesting time and person.

Cool, witty use of the visual effects of hairstyles, dresses and uniforms gaining tension from interplay with techniques and coarse canvases give this exhibition Hurley's special brand of piquancy.