Martin Basher’s latest solo exhibition at Starkwhite introduces a new body of work to a New Zealand audience. Large-scale paintings build graphic layers of hard-edged and linear botanical shapes into stark, sumptuous forms hovering somewhere between floral still-life — that traditional genre of painting steeped in allegory and moral contemplation — and hybridised, layered abstraction. Incorporating the gradient-based abstractions Basher is best known for, while pushing out into new territories of figuration, the exhibition takes his work into places the artist describes as some of the most “pictorially challenging, tenuous, interesting and exhausting I’ve been in for years.”