Culture

Milford Gallery
Until May 19

Dick Frizzell is a prominent and highly successful New Zealand artist, based in Hawke's Bay, whose notorious artistic appropriations have become ‘Kiwi’ pop-culture icons. His work is characterised as being incredibly adaptive from one style mode to another, injected with deadpan humour, and evoking a strong degree of 'baby-boomer' nostalgia. His art practice involves the appropriation of Kiwiana iconography and incorporation of these images into his artworks. Frizzell's most successful and best-known work predominantly uses the image of the ‘Four Square Man’, an icon that resonates particularly with small-town New Zealand. Frizzell began his career working as a commercial artist, and this background informs his work as an artist through his ability to blur the apparent categories between high and low art. His influences are clearly the American pop artists of the sixties, such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist. 
Frizzell's exhibition of works on paper at the Milford Gallery can be seen as demonstrating his adaptability as an artist, and his ability to make fun of the established intellectualism of high art and make references to an established culture of what defines New Zealand identity. This is clearly apparent in his works Overnight Success (2009) and his re-appropriation of the Maori tiki in Cutout Tiki (2005). 
These works can be seen as witty, funny, interesting to an extent, and not entirely visually unappealing; however, his subject matter may be seen to be irrelevant and outdated. Frizzell imitates the great American and European masters, but produces works that do not have their timeless quality. This is particularly evident in his painting, The Kiss (2009). The great American pop artists had a better understanding of contemporary advertising images, and were not only more intelligent and witty, but more in tune with the zeitgeist of their era in a way that affected one on a intellectual and emotional level. The reason this exhibition does not engage the viewer to the same degree could be that the canonical pop artists were more successful in conveying their understanding of the formal properties of what makes a strong image. In this sense Frizzell's work is somewhat lacking and does not have the same ability to draw the viewer in.