The two bodies of work explore similar interests but through different processes achieve very different results. Colour - as reflected light and colour as pigment - is one key common element. Space is another with the viewer and the space they occupy reflected and integrated in the immaculate mirror-like surfaces of Dahlhausen’s appropriately named Bodies. Architectural space and the integration of the three-dimensional is central to Calder’s draped paintings which hang on shaped steel rods away from the wall. This exhibition marks an advance in her practice with visible brush strokes now adding pattern and texture to her previously predominantly flat paint skins.

Pushing craft analogies, Calder may be seen as the weaver creating forms which dress space allowing us to see more than one surface. Dahlhausen is the jeweller, the alchemist polishing his metallic surfaces – with paint in first instance sprayed on by a professional car painter – until they are transformed, far from the car body, into luminous pool-like jewels held on their deep substrate of honeycomb aluminium which also plays with light.

Calder, who has a Master of Fine Arts from the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, has exhibited regularly in the public and private sectors for almost two decades. Her work is held in public and private collections with two large-scale works are currently on long-term display at Te Papa.

Dahlhausen is an artist and curator based in Bonn, Germany who has exhibited throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South America.