Art New Zealand Autumn 2025

In 1981, when I was 25 years old, my first art-teaching job was a position at Henderson High School. Philippa Blair also taught there, so we would carpool each morning. The trip from central Tāmaki to Henderson was over an hour, as the motorway only started at Pt Chevalier. We would talk, laugh, and destress after a day of teaching art to classes of 30 school kids. She spoke of her two daughters and her upcoming painting shows; I admired how she kept all the balls in the air, motherhood and a committed studio practice—she was a rising force in the local art scene. I learnt from her how to be an artist and a good art teacher. Philippa was flamboyant. This was reflected in her work, her great clothes…

Braunias was one tough rooster, an obdurate bugger, unexpectedly struck down a few days before Christmas. His sudden departure leaves a 40-year career as a nationally acclaimed artist. No other achievement need be registered as he regarded any other endeavour as inimical to the singular pursuit of his artistic practice. For him, this quest was entirely normal and something that should also be yours, that is, had you the courage. The artist's early career success was characterised by exuberant rudeness. Braunias cultivated material rawness via an abrasive pastiche of abstract expressionistic brushwork and coupled this with an irrepressible desire to skew pretentiousness. Notably he was the first to wheedle an image of an anonymous All Black into the artistic canon. Elevating the vernacular became a sustaining motivation and a hallmark…

Auckland Lubaina Himid & Michael Parekōwhai Prompts Artspace Aotearoa, 1 February–17 April SAMUEL TE KANI Prompts is not a showcasing of two established artists, and the late style that comes with that, so much as it is a timely archiving of two malcontents, whose early (urgent, rugged) styles are all too relevant again. A litmus for a world backsliding. A circular tolling of the alarm bells. Comprising works from Lubaina Himid (England, born in Tanzania) and Michael Parekōwhai (Ngāriki Rotoawe, Ngāti Whakarongo, New Zealand), the pieces arrive with their themes of ethnic (mis)representation and cultural assimilation as pertinent today as they were when first shown, respectively. If only because race baiting remains a mainstream strategy in politics. Is in fact the thrust of our current and allegedly centrist government, who…

John Parker is an Auckland-based ceramicist who has been exhibiting for 58 years. He gained an MA from London's Royal College of Art in 1975, and received a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2010. He is also a busy theatre set designer, with many credits, dating from 1984 to the present. In 2016 Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery hosted Cause And Effect, a major retrospective that celebrated his 50 years as a potter. The last time that Douglas Lloyd Jenkins interviewed Parker was 2016, noting back then that he was deep in an investigation of the colour blue for the Beyond Gravity works. John Parker: I'm really going through a black phase now. I almost called an exhibition His Dark Materials which I might still do. I like…

The emotive power of memory, the absences caused by its loss, and the enduring power of kaitiakitanga (guardianship, protection) form the centre around which Thirteen Months of Memories turns. This collaborative exhibition presents a series of 13 works that combine paintings made by Huhana Smith (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga) with custom-made sculptural frames, hand-constructed by Ciaran Banks. Smith and Banks situate the project within a dual conceptual framework that brings together kaitiakitanga with personal explorations of memory loss. In the wall text, Smith describes the project as ‘a personalised kaupapa on shared memory loss’, a process that has had a profound impact on both artists’ lives, albeit in quite different ways. Banks, an artist and woodworker, has experienced lifelong short-term memory loss following complications caused by brain…

British writer Robert Macfarlane described it as a thought-experiment, a ‘photo-negative flip’ inviting readers to blank out the interior landmasses of a map to imagine instead the sea as land, a shared space, a corridor, criss-crossed with stories and travel routes bordered by ‘a continuous territory of outwards-facing coastal settlements’.1 Macfarlane was thinking about the Atlantic Ocean when he wrote his 2012 book The Old Ways but, for much of his career, Christchurch sculptor Graham Bennett has turned his gaze to the Pacific Ocean, exploring systems of navigation, voyaging, place-making and cultural exchange. In doing so, writes art historian Robin Woodward in Graham Bennett: Around Every Circle, he explores the connections ‘between people and places, between cultural ideas, and the relationship of humankind with the ancient Earth itself’.2 That relationship,…