By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post 16/6/07

The collection of 63 New Zealand paintings currently hanging at Waikanae's Mahara Gallery is so strong and vital - dare I predict it, so engaging to all but the complete art luddite - it deserves to have a gallery built for it. Which is, in a funny way, exactly what has happened.

Image: iloveyoulandscape, Andrew McLeod (2006)By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post 16/6/07

The collection of 63 New Zealand paintings currently hanging at Waikanae's Mahara Gallery is so strong and vital - dare I predict it, so engaging to all but the complete art luddite - it deserves to have a gallery built for it. Which is, in a funny way, exactly what has happened.

Image: iloveyoulandscape, Andrew McLeod (2006)The Real Art Roadshow is a collection of paintings purchased by a private trust to take art out to schools over the next 10 years. Its Mahara showing is a public gallery try-out before it goes out on the road. The collection will be held in the back of a huge truck, with the trailer folding out into a 64 metre square gallery.

The novelty of the project lies not just in the nature of the gallery or the audacious size of the project, but that for once an expansive collection of New Zealand painting has been selected in one big swoop - a key to the exhibition's strength.

That the collection hangs together so well is a tribute to the trustees' vision and the rigour of the three curators (Gerald Barnett, Rob McLeod and Fiona Richter) in their selection. It's the kind of expansive curated-by-committee salon style show that so often looks so crowded and jumbled. Here there's such a strong web of threads between the works that wall labels become, thankfully, redundant. It should be a joyous room for both teacher and student to enter.

Hung with no attempt to provide a chronology or to box any of the works under any kind of theme or label, instead the Mahara Gallery hang is about connection between particular paintings irrespective of art movements and schools, geography and time.

The linkages between work can be surprising and rewarding. So strong sometimes you suspect each has been collected with their connection with another work in mind.

Putting Ian Scott's 1969 pop painting Homage to Morris Louis next to Andrew McLeod's 2006 I Love You Landscape plays with an artist's eye on the melodies in form echoing between them (perhaps an example of the strength of actually having a painter McLeod on the curatorial team), but it also plays on the irreverent cut, paste and warp dance both painters play with cultural history.

Neil Fraser's Deep Freeze sees an artist we're used to providing textural, painterly abstracts providing a more readable landscape. The cold brittleness of the sharp, sliding glacial formations is in beautiful play with the warm, muddy elemental pushes and pulls of Toss Woollaston's Nelson Landscape.

Nearby, the hessian canvas texture of the small circular Tony Fomison work Moon Child talks to the white hot pokerwork of Buck Nin and Braille-like patterning over landscape of James Cousins.

It also sees artists considered afresh. Known as one of our most conservative painters, you can however pick and choose a very contemporary-feeling selection from the massive output of Peter McIntyre. His small oil study of rocks from 1968 Outback Australia here is a beautiful case in point.

Choices like this are strong and often delightfully unexpected. For the seasoned gallery-goer the show is chock full of surprises, rather than a parade of pickings from the artists' iconic series. With no mandate to somehow try and sum up an artist or a period with one work, the paintings are free to be themselves.

I'm left appreciating older artists like Bill Sutton and Charles Tole afresh, and getting a greater handle on fantastic emerging painters like Seung Yul Oh and Miranda Parkes.

Like some astonishing and deadly phosphorescent deep sea creature, Maryrose Crook's Bringing All the Things That Run wins me over to her work in a way other exhibitions haven't.

The Real Art Roadshow doesn't appear to set out to be a historical introduction to New Zealand painting, but it does have enormous breadth. So much so that McCahon, Hotere, Killeen and Smither are conspicuous by their absence. It can broadly be labelled contemporary, with only two works painted before the late 1960s and at least half dating from the last five years.

And while the exhibition fizzes on the relationship between paintings irrespective of origin the curators have done an excellent job in getting a geographical spread. Often introductions to painting suffer a Canterbury or Auckland (not to mention individual) bias, whereas the catholic taste of this collection may surprise in the number of strong artists it throws up who are absent from most public gallery programmes.

There are some odd blips. It's hard to see why Seung Yul Oh is represented by two works (perhaps it awaits a final decision) and there's a solitary sculpture, Gregor Kregar's Still Life With Cars which doesn't really prove its reason for inclusion. The decision to limit the exhibition to painting is I think a strength.

Rather than set out to be representative of contemporary art practice, the Real Art Road Show focuses on being a truly great show. A truckload of other art media will have to wait.

After Mahara the exhibition is on a pilot tour of schools in the Wellington region during the third term (covering two schools a week) and finishing with a week outside Pataka for the public and Porirua schools in late September. Then in February the mobile collection heads to Southland and the beginning of its very long tour. Catch it when and where you can.

The Real Art Roadshow, Mahara Gallery, Waikanae, until 8 July and outside Pataka, Porirua, 17-21 September 2007