PAINTER Liz Maw grew up in a fundamentalist Catholic household.
“My mother would speak in tongues … I was completely bewitched by it,” says Maw.
The elaborate Catholic ceremonies of her youth filled her with a sense of beauty and the bizarre. Now an atheist, Maw says she exorcised herself from church indoctrination.
 “People are indoctrinated, I was, and people think they have made a choice but they don’t understand the process of indoctrination.”
The title of her latest exhibition at Peter McLeavey Gallery, Evil Genius Miscellaneous, seeks to capture the explosive and confronting style of her oil paintings.
 “They are figurative and surreal, or somewhere in between,” says Maw.  “It’s insidious, malevolent, celebrity, with an infamous element. The title very much sums it up, it is a motley crew.”
Single life-size figure paintings are one of Maw’s trademarks, with past paintings of Michael Jackson, Jesus, and Queen Elizabeth exposing some truth everyone knows about them, but are too polite to discuss. The Jesus image depicts a naked woman kneeling at his foot and seeks to display how the church capitalises on its pagan past.
The new show includes an abstract painting of Princess Diana, and a one of Sam Neill, because Maw was influenced by one of his early movies, Omen III: The Final Conflict.
“That movie had more of an effect on me than anything else he did. To paint something I need to feel a connection to it,” she says.
The show also features smaller paintings and a few ‘diptych’ sculpture pieces, including a giant double-bladed axe.
Gallery director Peter McLeavey says there is an element of pop art in the paintings, but the significance is more than skin deep.
“She paints the essence of the object. It expresses something deep and unsettling about the world we live in,” says McLeavey.
Two images in the exhibition impressed him greatly, that of Sam Neill and one of the sun in detail. Maw is a quintessential New Zealand artist, he said.
“The painting of the sun strikes me as a powerful image and for some reason it reminds me of Flash Gordon, a view of some alien planet from the portal of his space ship to the home maybe of Ming the Merciless, or the seductress of Orb.”
Liz Maw spent three overcast months obsessing over the sun painting, perfecting its fiery glow.
“It drove me a bit mad. I painted it last winter because it was so cold, I was building the world I wanted to live in, and it was a desperate act as if I could sit by it and warm up.”
Maw has only one show a year because she spends” an indulgently long time” on her work.
Evil Genius Miscellaneous, Peter McLeavey Gallery, 12 May – June 5.