(with Ryan Moore) Gallery Abstract 1:3, Michael Lett, Auckland 2006

From the Suter Catalogue: “This collaborative work between Billy Apple and Ryan Moore, made at the younger artist’s invitation while working at Michael Lett, takes on Apple’s signature Gallery Abstract tactics and upsizes them to a grand scale. Apple believes that making a big work doesn’t make the idea any bigger. However Moore envisioned a large-scale painting where he invited Apple to provide the content. By negotiation they developed a strategy which tests the conventions of art production. Conceptually driven by a relationship of threes, the work is a third of the scale of the Michael Lett gallery floor, the participants are the two artists and the gallerist and it is priced conceptually.

From Christina Barton, Billy Apple: Art/Life:

“Apple was always open to new opportunities and on occasion worked in collaboration with other artists. A particularly thought-provoking instance was in 2006 when Ryan Moore, a postgraduate student at Elam then working for the Auckland dealer Michael Lett in his small street-level gallery on Karangahape Road, invited Apple to collaborate on a one-work exhibition (25 May – 1 July). They determined to produce a Gallery Abstract (a series Apple had begun
in 2000), whereby the artist reproduces the floor plan of
a space as a ready-made composition for a painted canvas that is then hung in the same gallery as the site-specific ‘abstract’ painting. On this occasion, they made a stretched canvas exactly two-thirds the size of the wall on which it was to be placed, leaving the linen support unprimed. They then invited Terry Maitland to paint a black shape that mirrored the space’s floor plan at 1:3 scale of the total floor area and set the work’s terms of sale as a three-way split between the two artists and the dealer.”

“This was a sophisticated instance of a young artist learning by testing Apple’s modus operandi. For example, the raw canvas lent the work a warmth and tactility that was different from Apple’s usual method, which delivers a clinical and deadpan finish using preset colour-coding (such as the CMYK or red/ green systems) and uninflected manufacture.31 Though clearly an instance of the series, in its relation to the space for which it was made, this work somehow rose out of its circumstances to convey the aura of ‘classic’ painting. It was as if Moore, struck
by the refinement of Apple’s distillation of the principles of site- specificity, wanted to transmit his respect by referring to the aesthetic tropes of an older and more privileged medium.”

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