Michael Hight / 30 April -23 May 2008

Michael Hight returns to John Leech Gallery with an impressive suite of eight new works. Depicted with photo-realistic precision, the majority of these paintings portray beehives located in and around the Central North Island. The exception is a single painting of a snow-covered hive, where the artist re-visits the content of prior works located in the South Island, at Mt Somers, in winter.

Hight's new paintings offer a psychological intensity more pronounced than examples of recent years, many of which were set amongst the vast heroic backdrop of the central Otago region. This impression is cleverly achieved by a mixture of formal devices that include close-range observation, augmenting details, and cropping.

While Hight's paintings are clearly representational, abstract forms reveal themselves in the texture of weathered timber and cracked paint, by the formality of stacked boxes and frames or through the complex tonal rhythms forming distant foliage and fields of tussock. Up close such details are masterfully rendered through gestural strokes of pigment carefully placed to register the effects of light and pattern.

Nearly all of the works in this series have been created on a domestic scale, save for the epic Kerepihi (2008) which dominates the exhibition at three metres wide. This is Hight's largest single panel work to date and is intriguing for reasons beyond its technical virtuosity. Produced on a scale conventionally reserved for subject matter on par with its size, Kerepihi confronts the viewer with imperfection. Life size and close-up, the artist's lens zooms in on remnants of industry - a battered beekeeper's shed nestled among miscellaneous debris, a skeletal rusting shelter conceding defeat against the elements, stacked wooden boxes and lids finding solace among weeds. There are echoes of McCahon’s quasi-cubist triptych On Building Bridges (1952, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki) reverberating within the composition - specifically in the angles of the corroded steel structure repeated in the stacked boxes and wooden palettes, and the manner in which the decaying metal frame appears to coalesce with its surrounds. As did Colin McCahon before him, Hight has metaphorically captured the human element among the landscape and the symbiotic relationship that exists.