By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post 14/11/07

The New Zealand International Arts Festival launch brought news that an exhibition of recent work by Seraphine Pick will accompany classic work by Frances Hodgkins at Waikanae's Mahara Gallery in March. They'll make excellent companions. Pick is in many ways Hodgkins' heir apparent.

Image: Seraphine Pick, Burning the Furniture (2007)Even in this day and age Pick's intense focus on the female figure in a psychological landscape makes her something of a lone figure.

Like Hodgkins and another descendent Rita Angus, Pick dresses up the female form to unpick the codes within the embroidery - to re-express from a contemporary perspective the anxiety embedded in the female image. If other contemporary artists unconsciously stay clear of the depiction of women for the fact that its overexploited, it leaves it to Pick to breed together imagery from fashion and art history in a hothouse, dreamily upsetting mythologies still inherent in our treatment of the female figure.

To look at Pick's work in recent years (an excellent range of reproductions are to be seen on dealers' Hamish McKay, Michael Lett and Brooke Gifford gallery websites) is to observe a culture vulture eating up imagery and giving it new fantastical flesh. The world is constantly reinvigorated in new arrangements full of the glamour and eroticism of dreams. If there's a Wellington-based artist due a large survey for us to comprehend the scope of their work right now, Pick is it.

We make do with the occasional show at dealer Hamish McKay like Burning the Furniture. Which means I'm left after this exhibition feeling disappointed for only having seen one facet of Pick's recent work. A few works here feel relatively minor; others rehash old ground. Yet they do display Pick's willingness to push herself into new directions whilst also working to stay grounded in what she knows.

Like in a Bill Hammond, a large work like Burning the Furniture is full of motifs and elements you've seen plenty before; yet they're piled up in order to allow the painter to move on somewhere else. The title is apt. Pick could be the woman in the painting stacking furniture, building an outrageous pyre out of redundant symbology or a marriage gone wrong. While some recent works have been lush with a kind of hydroponic Pacific growth, in this work there's a chill of the Victorian drawing room, as if we've transplanted back to dark England like some fern in a bell jar. Perhaps our past is that Maori boy in his piu piu and jacket, cuddling a fluffy white cat for comfort.

This painting has a tension Pick is so good at pitching - it disturbs with its psychological honesty yet is full of contrived gestures. It is loaded and empty all at the same time, reminiscent of the deadly decoration of contemporaries like Maryrose Crook and Peter Madden but also daring to get inside the skin of its subjects

Another large work Living Arrangements is set in a cultural desert. Ghost glamour girls float around, self-conscious and unsure of their ground (I'm reminded of the melancholic girl in Picasso's famous Family of Saltimtanques). Having constructed sculptures out of high heels, or tossed over designer furniture they express an unease and aimlessness, as disenchanted with things as they are charmed by them. It's as if they're at a loss to find meaning in the detritus of life, consumed with the fear that they, like this decoration, might be fading away like a mirage.

The inertia created by fear and desire here expresses a contemporary entrapment we feel but rarely express well. One woman is seen with a bird halfway down her throat. It's a reversal of the bird that swallows a girl in Hieronyous Bosch, but it's equally like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights a meditation on excess.

A series of small works here focus on singular character in a setting, rather than the layering of potential narratives Pick's best known for. The figures appear like models from fashion shoots who have strayed into darker, surreal scenarios - Northern European folk tales full of wolves and waifs. They're like strange enchanted and enchanting creatures encountered on some journey designed to teach us of the dangers of excess. Except here it's as if these dreams are trailed through the pages of fashion magazines.

Like the rotting food of a vanitas painting, as these women strike a romantic pose in uber cool attire their eyes burn away to nothing, or their made-up faces become a skeletal reminder of death. They're like little icons reminding us of how things get stuck in our throats when we gorge ourselves on the sensual abundance of life.

Burning the Furniture, Seraphine Pick, Hamish McKay Gallery, until 30 November