PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Auckland

EXHIBITED
Milan Mrkusich Sue Crockford Gallery Auckland May 2 - 26 1995 TRANSFORM The Abstract Art of Milan Mrkusich Gus Fisher Gallery 6 March - 2 May 2009

ILLUSTRATED
plate 82 Installation shot, Mrkusich The Art of Transformation, Alan Wright & Ed Hanfling, Auckland University Press, 2009

Achromatic with Cadmium Yellow Deep 1991 is a "compound shaped painting", which means it is a single work made of multiple painted canvases. It has three such panels and is from a series of three such works (there is a red one and a blue one). The three 1991 Colour/Achromatic paintings were shown together at the Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland, in 1995, while this yellow one featured individually in the City Gallery Wellington exhibition, TransForm: The Abstract Art of Milan Mrkusich, in 2010. It is resplendently representative of an approximately twelve year period in Mrkusich's career, from 1986 to 1997, during which compound shaped paintings were a particular focus, beginning with the Journey paintings of 1986 to 1989 (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa hold fine examples of those). By taking standard rectangular canvases and joining them, the artist could set in motion a range of rhythms and resonances. Each panel declares a fact - of colour (such as yellow) or non-colour (such as grey) - but together the chromatic and achromatic shapes and relationships have the capacity to produce an experience that frees the mind from the constraints of ordinary language and social conventions. Mrkusich stands apart from other New Zealand artists, largely because of the extraordinary rigour and refinement of his work, and for his sustained involvement with the big issues - not "issues" in the sense of current affairs, political upheavals, and so forth (which are measly matters, really, for making art about), but our feeling for more fundamental physical and metaphysical realities.

In the compound shaped paintings, Mrkusich gave himself the freedom of, as it were, building the panels into space. What likely strikes the viewer first about Achromatic with Cadmium Yellow Deep, apart from its unusual overall shape, is the sheer expansiveness of the yellow colour field - grand, resounding and thrilling. It seems free and open, not least because of the narrow panels that edge it left and top, lending the sense of a picture that grows outwards to wherever it wants to end, rather than kept in check by a framing edge. Think of the architect's floor plan blueprint. Think of a daringly cantilevered building. Or think about a painting that looks integral to an architectural interior, its beautifully crafted surfaces floating forward of the wall, yet acknowledging its presence, as opposed to the "hole" that the traditionally rendered and framed picture gouges out of the wall (Frank Lloyd Wright despised pictures that messed with his architecture, while Piet Mondrian said that representational paintings were better turned face to the wall). Mrkusich's art takes place in real space. For seventy years or so, while generations of New Zealand writers maundered on about those artists they claimed depicted "the human condition", or preached it, Mrkusich quietly went about the business of making things, which is the human condition. He made propositions about life, and Achromatic with Cadmium Yellow Deep is, to my mind, an especially unfettered and generous one.

EDWARD HANFLING