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Structures of Identity and Influence:
grid paintings by Max Podstolski Review by William McAloon, The Press, 30 January 1992 Taking inspiration from an exhibition held in the early eighties about dominant trends in New Zealand art in the seventies may seem a curious way to make art in the nineties, but such is the nature of Max Podstolski's project, on display in the CSA Canaday Gallery. The show in question, as Podstolski indicates, is the Auckland City Gallery's "The Grid" exhibition, which looked at the work of Ian Scott, Ray Thorburn, Geoff Thornley and others. By the time that show emerged, however, the style had become periodised, located in the past tense as being at the end of a path of modernism. The grid had before been identified as an ordering structure, going back to Mondrian and Malevich and before, taking the Renaissance idea of the picture as a window on the world to a particular conclusion, that is focusing on the window frame itself, as the ordering device of pictorial construction. Podstolski's position seems unconcerned with such revisions of modernism, as have occurred in recent post-modern abstraction, for example, in an American, David Daio, or a New Zealander, Stephen Bambury, and so his work looks for the most part dated, particularly in its sharp colours and hard surfaces. Some fragments of a revision are apparent amidst the predominantly formalist and modernist concerns of the work and others that are more informed by a graphic language of doodles and pop-portraits. The three works based around Picasso's line portrait of Paul Eluard have in their imposition of quotation over a grid structure a superficial resemblance to an Australian artist, Imants Tillers, but share none of that painter's concerns for translation and originality as a set of codes to be explored. Podstolski is not concerned with replaying a style and making ironic references to the assumptions and conditions of that style, but rather continues as if it had never died.
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