“In Motion,” the group exhibition currently on view at Starkwhite, Auckland, is a continuous dance of colors, with works from four contemporary artists from Australia and New Zealand—Rebecca Baumann, Brendan Van Hek, Grant Stevens, and Alicia Frankovich—and two historical artists: the Hungarian-American artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) and New Zealand-born Len Lye (1901–1980). The exhibition opens with Rebecca Baumann and Brendan Van Hek’s collaborative work Untitled (2015), a minimal set of three mirrored acrylic panels, tinted in CMY primary colors (cyan, magenta, and yellow) and mounted in aluminum frames. Though static and flat, the work positions the visitor as a performer-spectator in a room of mirrors, in which movement and reflection, light and color, orchestrate an altered perception of space. The panels create a trompe-l’oeil effect: the white, neutrally lit gallery transforms into a cold blue, warm pink, or garish yellow room respectively, while the visual combination of panels results in mixtures of red, blue, and green. But despite its attractive color and sense of play, the installation is only fleetingly captivating, leaving little impression of the experience on the viewer. Upstairs the atmosphere is more seductive, with works that engage the transitory nature of perception with more experimental and symbolic approaches. Particle …

As its title suggests, “Plastic Mouthfeel II,” the latest exhibition from New Zealand artist Dan Arps, is a space full of viscous forms, loaded with colors and textures, that causes a constant sense of elastic deformation. Take, for example, Studio Units with Double Hamper (2015), a set of five white but unclean folding trestle tables, located at the center of the gallery, on top of and around which an uncustomary arrangement of disparate objects and detritus invites careful examination. Spread out on the tables and the surrounding floor—as the landscape of a work in progress, such as those found in art schools—are casts, brightly tinted pots, splashed paint, clay chunks, multicolored Abstract Expressionist sculptures, melted assemblages, boxes, and a pink polka-dot double hamper. Some pieces of the installation are particularly comical, such as a small, white, psychedelic sculpture of a piggy bank on a mushroom, and a readymade with a dragon figure carrying on its back a rolled-up dirty towel. But this thoughtful mess seems not meant for display or public consumption. While trying to scrutinize the content of a carton on the floor, one gets the uncanny sensation of poking around someone’s stuff. Evoking the spirit of a workshop …

Daniel Malone is not a painter, but his current show is full of paintings. And while it may be a solo exhibition, there are two artists in the room. The second is Colin McCahon—but more about him in a minute. Upon entering Hopkinson Mossman’s gorgeous, bright white gallery space, the paintings were something of a head scratcher. They looked distinctly not contemporary—neither in palette, nor in composition, nor in iconography. I made an overconfident and undereducated snap aesthetic judgment: Sigmar Polke by way of Robert Motherwell. But I stayed with the paintings, and they began to disclose themselves over time, as paintings tend to do. Or, to paraphrase another twentieth-century painter, Philip Guston, the “information” may be fast, but the painting is slow. My information, it turned out, was wrong, but its wrongness may be instructive. Daniel Malone is a New Zealand artist who moved to Poland seven years ago, but has spent the past couple months in residence at Parehuia, the McCahon House Artists’ Residency outside of Auckland in Titirangi. In the 1950s Colin McCahon (1919–1987) lived here with his wife, artist Anne Hamblett, and their four children, on French Bay among the native Kauri trees, which can grow to …