Mokopopaki, the smallest gallery in Auckland, is showing work by the artist with the largest reputation.
Billy Apple has registered his name as a trademark brand name since his early international success as an extravagantly radical artist emerging from the Royal College of Art in London.
His work is generally about transaction or transformation. This one is about artistic transformation of space.
In The gallery, mostly devoted to work by Māori artists, the principal room is painted brown. In one transformation, Billy Apple took the lino off the floor to expose the sturdy timber planks.
This second transaction is to express the gallery space as a purely abstract painting. Uniquely, the gallery has a smart, perfectly working shower in one corner.
When the work is on show the shower is turned on. The square at the bottom is the area of the shower tray. The two colours of the painting are very intense because they are done in UV impregnated ink on the unreflecting surface of primed canvas.
The surface is unblemished by signature. It is present but hidden. So, perhaps, is the meaning of the work beyond the rarefied process.
Billy Apple, is an artist whose work is associated with the New York and British schools of Pop Art in the 1960s and with the Conceptual Art movement in the 1970s. He collaborated with the likes of Andy Warhol and other pop artists.
