Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2025-2026 i Art New Zealand

Beauty often conceals as much as it reveals. The most refined landscapes can carry the deepest erasures, hiding histories of violence beneath symmetry and calm. In Ruin on the Cascade, Ayesha Green (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga, Kāi Tahu, Pākehā) brings the full weight of her Māori and Pākehā identity to bear on one of British imperialism’s most enduring symbols: the English garden. Presented in May at Auckland’s Season gallery, the exhibition reconfigured the space into an immersive environment—both commanding in scale and disquieting in tone. Green’s large-scale paintings and sculptural installations charged the rooms with the spatial ambition, theatricality and compositional control of the landscapes they examine. What first appears as a site of leisure gradually reveals itself as a place of forgetting—a picturesque theatre in which empire’s grandest ambitions…

I first walked with Catherine Griffiths one afternoon in Wellington in 2007, although she was not there. The wind blew; clouds billowed over the harbour; waves slapped against walls and boats. I stood on the City to Sea Bridge and read: It’s true you can’t live here by chance, you have to do and be, not simply watch or even describe. This is the city of action, the world headquarters of the verb― These lines, cast into a concrete slab cantilevered on the bridge, were inescapable: their confident typeface emphasised the force of the poet Lauris Edmond’s love of her city, and reminded me why I was there. Catherine Griffiths designed 15 concrete text sculptures between 2000 and 2004.1 She had been commissioned by the Wellington branch of the New…

Scott Cai is a young Chinese-New Zealand artist whose photographic work is informed by a parallel practice in Vipassanā, an ancient meditation technique with origins in Buddhism. Vipassanā aims to directly perceive the nature of reality, cultivating mindfulness in the pursuit of higher levels of consciousness. It aims to develop awareness of one’s lived experience―such as bodily sensations, thoughts or feelings―in order to remain consciously in the present. To notice ourselves noticing. In keeping with this, Cai’s photographs are imbued with a sense of stillness, quietly drawing attention to our immediate surroundings, the present moment and the ever-shifting light. These bright, sometimes slightly hazy exposures also resonate with a subtle visual hum, their vibrant colour and impressionistic light recalling the photochemical properties of film. His close cropping homes in on…

Out of the Blue: Essays on Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, 1985–2021 by Christina Barton Te Herenga Waka University Press & Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Wellington 2025 ALEX BACON As an American art historian it is a provocative undertaking to consider a body of writing on Aotearoa New Zealand artists by Christina Barton, one of the country’s senior curators and writers. Out of the Blue: Essays on Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, 1985–2021 anthologises nearly 40 years of Barton’s impressive writerly output. While the artists surveyed are prominent figures in the region, I was not familiar with most of them before reading this volume. Like many foreigners, I arrived in Auckland, first in 2019 for a conference, and again earlier this year, as a visiting scholar at Elam…

Auckland Nicky Foreman Daphne and Apollo Artis Gallery, 26 August–8 September MICHAEL DUNN It is unusual for a contemporary New Zealand exhibition to have a title derived from an ancient Greek myth but that is the case with Nicky Foreman’s Daphne and Apollo. Her show specifically references the myth and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous marble sculpture of it, carved c.1624, one of the artist’s favourite works of art. However, her title is less surprising when we consider that Foreman is an established practitioner who has travelled extensively in Europe and whose art is shaped by a range of influences both local and international. When referring to them, in both the exhibition notes and in the artworks themselves, she reverses the usual order of Apollo and Daphne, giving Daphne precedence. In…

The invocation of community is by no means rare within the discourse of contemporary art. There exists a rich and multi-faceted network, made up predominantly of independently run spaces, highly attuned to the needs of their communities. Outside of this context, however, there remains a danger that such invocations of community remain little more than set-dressing, performative efforts to engage with a practice of inclusion that, in practice, falls short of its collaborative and generative promise. As such, it is particularly powerful to experience the palpable presence of a community-driven exhibition within a public gallery. He Tukutuku Auahatanga: Maureen Lander with Community is one such example. Curated by Taarati Taiaroa (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Apa), the exhibition includes the work of over 100 individuals, brought together by Lander (Ngāpuhi,…

One Friday in late August, I travelled to Ngāmotu New Plymouth to visit the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre’s current exhibition. The weather is bright and still and conversation-openers with strangers tend to the amount of snow on the maunga, how unusually low it’s got this year. Direct Bodily Empathy―Sensing Sound was curated by Anna Briers, the gallery’s recently appointed Kaitakatū Senior Curator Len Lye and Contemporary Art, to celebrate the tenth-anniversary year of the Len Lye Centre. According to the gallery, the show ‘explores sound as a medium, and the dimensions of sympathetic resonance, attuning with shared vibration, embodied knowledge, and the physical act of deep listening’, placing Len Lye ‘in concert’ with his contemporaries. At the entrance to the exhibition, Mia Salsjö’s A Score for the Len Lye…

I have always held a deep reverence and fascination for the ocean―I learned from a young age how to read the tides and swim with the currents. As a child I heard the tales of Paikea and how one of my ancestors had been transported to Aotearoa on the back of a whale. These stories were magical to me. They conveyed a deep sense of belonging that was intrinsically tied to the ocean. And so, the ocean has always been a signifier of home to me. But not everyone experiences the sea in this way. For some, rather than signifying home, the sea is a symbol of danger and brutal disconnection. The crashing waves are painful reminders of loved ones stolen and stowed away on slave ships. The shoreline is…

When easel painting was transported to Britain’s colonies in Australasia, the landscape was an obvious and popular subject. The ‘new’ land was painted and recorded, even as the natural vegetation was being replaced by paddocks, pastures and settlements. The landscape remained a dominant focus for the painters of both New Zealand and Australia, but the former also developed a subject area which appears to have no significant equivalent in the art of the latter: the inclusion of words and text. The interest here is the employment of a literary content in paintings, as a significant and/or dominant feature, and one beyond the perfunctory inclusion of the artist’s signature, date and title. One suggestion as to why this might have become a distinctive feature of New Zealand painting is a legacy…