Jan van der Ploeg at Hamish McKay

Jan van der Ploeg’s best-known shape began as a hole in a cardboard box. The handle cut-out. A rectangle with rounded corners, the place your fingers go when you lift a carton. He started working with it in 1997 and called it the grip. Nearly thirty years later it is still there, turned, inverted and repeated, holding the compositions together.

His new works are now showing at Hamish McKay in Wellington. The centrepiece is a wall painting, No. 584 in a numbered sequence that began on the streets of Amsterdam in the 1990s. Around it sits a group of small acrylics on canvas and paper, all made this year. The largest canvases are 360 millimetres square. The smallest are barely bigger than a sheet of A4.

The two scales work against each other. The wall painting takes the whole room and asks you to step back. The small paintings ask you to stand close. Hard edges, flat colour, nothing wasted. Up close, the precision is the point.

Van der Ploeg was born in 1959 and trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie. The De Stijl lineage is clear. He has made hundreds of wall paintings since, in museums, lobbies and stairwells, each one shaped by the space it occupies. His work is held by the Stedelijk and the Boijmans. In 1999 he founded PS, an artist-run space in Amsterdam devoted to abstract and conceptual work.

He has a long history with Hamish McKay, including an earlier show alongside Julian Dashper and John Nixon. Restraint suits him. A small vocabulary, used with great care.

Worth the trip.