Offering It Up is Sophia Smolenski’s first solo show in a public art gallery, although she has worked in the industry for over a decade as a mount-maker and exhibition technician. It features a magnificent bright red welder’s screen, comically oversi

Scientists have struggled for centuries to agree on how best to demarcate living from non-living things. Is the distinction a matter of degree or dichotomy? Emily Parke, an Auckland-based philosopher of science, says that there have been more than a

Molly Timmins Rewilding the Garden Sanderson Contemporary 13 May–9 June MICHAEL DUNN Two exhibitions hung together at Sanderson Contemporary showed new paintings by Molly Timmins and Llenyd Price in separate rooms of the spacious gallery. Both are em

Australian-born Jackie Ranken’s work is characterised by a distinct style that seamlessly blends elements of nature and human response, resulting in her visually striking and emotionally evocative compositions. Her early exposure to the New Zealand l

Print in Aotearoa New Zealand has always had its champions. Some work behind the scenes, others are outspoken movers and shakers, ensuring print remains a dynamic field of creative practice. A brief historic overview sees the first Print Council of N

Before us now there is nothing but sea, sea, sea: one spread, vast, moving field, veined with currents, shimmering with light, and shot like an opal with varying colours—purple and peacock, turquoise and azure, silver and gold and green—an illimitabl

Venice’s first International Art Exhibition was held in 1895, the year before the first modern Olympic Games, and ‘the Olympics of art’ has become a routine journalistic gloss for the Biennale d’Arte. Mataaho Collective won one of the three main priz

Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa by Kirsty Baker with contributions from Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith and Megan Tamati-Quennell Auckland University Press, Auck

Toi Whakaata/Reflections presents a selection of works by Fred Graham (b.1928) (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) made between 1965 and 2013. Displayed in one large room, on the ground floor at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, the sculptures are i

The first solo exhibition held in Gow Langsford’s spectacular new gallery in Princes Street, Onehunga was John Pule’s Haia—new paintings and drawings, 11 May to 8 June. It was a fitting choice as 2024 is the thirtieth anniversary of Pule’s first exhi

Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life tracks this artist’s history and with it that of the textile arts in Aotearoa from the 1950s to the present day. In addition, Blackman’s curatorial projects are documented in videos and mus

Mélange… a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. Salman Rushdie ‘In Good Faith’ (1991) Many artists are prodigious readers and intensive researchers. Books can be portals into new worlds, ideas, different kinds of knowledge.1

‘From the moment I started talking to her I knew it sounded silly. Usually, she would be discussing therapy for relationship issues, drug addiction and mental illnesses, yet here I am explaining to her that I can’t stop doing graffiti.’ Many graffiti

It is safe to guess that the correct answer to about 50 per cent of every pub quiz question on ’80s music is ‘Wham!’, and the legacy of the disco duo lives on, perhaps a little dubiously, at the Pah Homestead. Having recently watched a documentary ab

Here is artist Bill Sutton, aged 60. Arguably at the height of his painting career. The slightly out-of-focus face confirms an impromptu snap, capturing the artist wearing a jersey, paisley cravat and jovial smile.1 Radiating warmth and generosity, I

Maureen Lander (Ngāpuhi, Te Hikutu) uses Kemp House, New Zealand's oldest existing building, as a setting for an installation that explores events that took place some 200 years ago but continue to impact Māori lives. Through a combination of archiva

Don Abbott, Deputy Editor of Art New Zealand, is the author of Vivid: The Paul Hartigan Story and Elizabeth Rees: I Paint. Grant Banbury is an independent art consultant and art writer based in Christchurch. Tharron Bloomfiel is a curator and conserv

Ans Westra. A Life in Photography by Paul Moon Massey University Press, Auckland 2024 MARY MACPHERSON For nearly 70 years, Ans Westra photographed the life of Aotearoa New Zealand and its people, taking an estimated 325,000 images. In his insightful

Form is developed by means of light and shade; without these every object would appear flat. Mrs (Mary P.) Merrifield, Handbook of Light and Shade, 1855 English art critic John Berger described a drawing as 'an autobiographical record of one's discov

In Ringawera II (2022) two men gather in the whare kai around a sack of rīwai (potatoes), peeling them in preparation for feeding a large group. With their backs to the viewer, the light catches the creases of their clothes. The term ringawera refers

I never met Hamish Kilgour. I don't profess to an encyclopaedic knowledge of the music of The Clean or his wider musical catalogue. I make these admissions not for some critical impartiality, but because both the personality of Hamish Kilgour and his

To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (1986), p. 97. The unspoken assumption of the contemporary art world is that the genre of landscape, particularly the practice of plein air painting, is pl

Birth. Awakening. Growth. Adolescence. Maturity. Courtship. Motherhood. Tranquillity. This is the trajectory laid out in Ava Seymour's solo exhibition Domestic Wild at Titirangi's Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, each milestone presented as a p

Ian Scott made enough paintings to be the life's work of a dozen or more highly prolific artists. Indeed, within his oeuvre, there are such dissimilar series of paintings that many have been surprised to learn they were all by the same person. The sh

The 1988 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade was led by its first Indigenous float, lit up by Aboriginal dancer Malcolm Cole in drag as Captain Cook. American cultural theorist Eric Michaels, then in the last year of his life, teaching Media Stu