Billy Apple - Drawings & Reliefs (1996)

15 years after his first show in the Lorne Street gallery, Billy Apple returns to the same space to reprise the previous two exhibitions as a ‘2 in1’ tribute to Flint. Like the 2007 exhibition at Brett McDowell Gallery, Dunedin, which now occupies the site of the former Bosshard and Siefert Galleries, this new exhibition is the artist’s first with Antoinette Godkin Gallery but it reiterates the conditions of a space Billy Apple had previously worked in while subtly revealing the evolving conditions of its present usage. 3 Flint, who died suddenly on 11 September, 2010, became one of Auckland’s leading gallerists, responsible in the 1990s for many important early shows that stand testament to his aesthetic sensibility with artists ranging from Bill Hammond, Tony Lane, Michael Parekowhai, Peter Peryer, Ronnie Van Hout, Michael Stevenson and many more.

With Drawings and Reliefs at the Gregory Flint Gallery, Lorne Street, 1996, the artist turned his focus from the transactional works, which had played a dominant role in his work of the '80s, back to the politics of gallery space, significant in his oeuvre since the '70s. In 1994, he had his first solo exhibition with Gregory Flint Gallery at The Strand, where four small works, one to represent each decade of his career from the '60s to the '90s, hung on the four sides of a column. He rejected the surrounding walls to hang the works, instead directing the viewer’s attention towards the centre of the gallery. For the 1996 Lorne Street exhibition, he focused on the pillar itself by hanging pairs of works in the gallery’s corners that represented site-specific isometric viewpoints from each corner to the central column. In 1997, Billy Apple had his third and final solo exhibition with Flint, installing around the faces of the column, bar graphs of green vinyl in four golden ratio percentages totalling up to 100 percent. Again defying hanging conventions, on each facing wall (including a window) he placed pearlescent acrylic disks, scaled up in golden ratio proportions to match the appropriate bar graph. These pie charts are segmented to represent the artist’s and dealer’s respective golden ratio commission of 61.8% and 38.2%, or as Apple calls it, AC:DC (artist cut/dealer cut).

-Andrew Clifford

Event listed by Antoinette Godkin Gallery

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