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Overview
Dromorne Rd — Putiki Street is tall and overbearing like the wall of a house. The viewer approaches this cool-grey patchwork cotton composition as though it might be hard work. And in a way it is. This painting is composed from the cotton drop sheets that Andrew Barber used as a professional house painter in Auckland over a five-year period. Barber’s title, like his colour scheme, is practical and dispassionate. He first used the drop sheets at a job on Dromorne Road in Remuera and last used them at Putiki Street in Grey Lynn. Barber says, ‘I don’t differentiate between making a picture on a canvas or painting a wall for a client. In both processes, when possible, I take the necessary steps to ensure permanence, i.e. making a painting that might last longer than myself.’1
Barber conflates house painting with the history of modernist painting. In her defining 1979 essay ‘Grids’, the art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss claimed that ‘the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art’. In the early twentieth century painters moved away from depicting the ‘real world’ and entered the gridded realm of abstraction. Dromorne Rd — Putiki Street looks like a checkerboard or a tiled floor, but also contains the classic modernist grid. It is both esoteric and utilitarian.
Barber first became known for a series of imagined landscapes produced using thick house-painting brushes and early linear works based on plans of tennis courts, alluding to art collecting as a high-class sport. For a house painter much of the job is spent preparing the site. Perhaps that’s why Barber often turns the technical aspects of the job inside out. In Dromorne Rd — Putiki Street the process has become the product: smears and splatters of paint stipple the drop sheets. Sailmakers then stitched the sheets into a diagonal pattern on industrial sewing machines. The back of the stretcher is also on display as worthy of aesthetic consideration in its own right. Many of Barber’s abstractions are installed as three-dimensional objects within the gallery. In this way, a painting is no longer just a two-dimensional image to be hung on the wall: it is the wall.
Megan Dunn
1 Andrew Barber, email to Megan Dunn, 21 November 2017.
Andrew Barber created this work from the drop sheets he used in his 12-year career as a house painter. The squares were stitched together by sail-makers on industrial machines.
The title reflects this transformation. Barber did his first house-painting job in Dromorne Road. Putiki Street is where this art work was first exhibited.
The drops and smears of paint here are incidental. Fabric that was once scrunched and folded takes on a crisp new geometric form, suggesting other objects entirely: a wall, a marble floor, or an oversized chessboard.