Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2025 i Art New Zealand

Robyn. Our Whaea. Our Wahine Toa . . .who belonged to us all. To you, Robyn. You were born . . . a daughter of Ngāti Porou . . . but you became the great matriarch for us all, and so, we can never describe, in so few words, our desolation in losing you. Your art performed the roles of both an orator and kaikaranga . . . and the oratory that flowed from your canvases helped shape the obligations inherent in our identity as the children of Te Tiriti. Your art fought like powerful banners against the complex political realities we still face today and so it is . . . that Shona and I are not alone in acknowledging your matriarchal influence whose art shaped a strategic role…

Auckland Bruce Hunt Coast to Coast Artis Gallery, 14–28 July MICHAEL DUNN It is no longer as common to see an exhibition of landscape paintings and photographs as it used to be in the heyday of the Kelliher Prize in the 1960s and 1970s when landscape was a central subject in New Zealand painting. But Bruce Hunt’s accomplished exhibition called Coast to Coast proves that landscape has a continuing appeal to some contemporary artists. In fact, highly successful and esteemed painters such as Dick Frizzell continue to produce landscapes as part of their output. For a period, Bruce Hunt moved from Wellington to Dunedin drawn by what he has called in his gallery notes ‘the great expanses of certain South Island landscapes’. In this show he presents views empty of…

‘How precious are the flowers of mid-winter!’ Vita Sackville-West’s Garden Book It is June and rain has fallen for days without pause. Dahlia tubers lie like benign mines on the deck; a layer of cardboard over naked soil makes up for the inability of Auckland to muster a frost. No such trouble in Wānaka, where Katherine Throne looks up, past our video call and out her window at a garden girded for an unequivocal winter. ‘It’s a pretty tough environment out there,’ she says. ‘We’ve just had four days of really severe winter frosts, droughts for months. These plants are just so resilient and so beautiful. The garden looks like it’s dead but it’s not.’1 Many gardeners before Throne have made this same observation, including the writer Vita Sackville-West, doyenne…

A mantra of my father’s in his later life was ‘I make art to live, whereas you live to make art’. This was not actually true. Even in his last week at hospital he spoke excitedly about the upcoming unveiling of his most recent work, Te Manu Rangimārie, a 12-metre corten-steel sculpture, to be unveiled at Piarere roundabout near Horahora, close to his birthplace and childhood home on the Waikato River. He is most closely associated with what has come to be known as the ‘Māori Contemporary Art movement’, alongside others such as Arnold Wilson, Para Matchitt and Selwyn Muru. Their generation of Māori artists was known for fusing elements of Western modernism with the rich visual language of Māori art. In 1966, he and his peers organised a landmark…

The Brood at The Dowse Art Museum begins in a space that feels as much like the inside of a body as it does a room. It is a vestibule. Dark and red and subterranean, the bustle of the giftshop drops away the moment I step inside, replaced by a wash of sound that bleeds from the exhibition—warped as if heard through a fleshy membrane. This room-as-body is an appropriate starting point for an exhibition named after David Cronenberg’s 1979 body horror movie, in which a mother who undergoes experimental therapy gives birth to raging demons that wreak havoc in the lives of those who have wronged her. Stepping out of the giftshop, I descend into The Dowse’s external womb. The vestibule opens onto a dramatically lit wall presenting The…

There is a kinetic energy to many of the thousands of black-and-white photographs Graeme Russell has shot on the streets of Christchurch. A banjo player is captured in mid-song. A pedestrian marches in tune with his own shadow. The ‘hssst’ of a spray can is almost audible in his many images of graffiti art. Others, however, are more quiet . . . a stillness evident in these moments captured in time. It is this lack of noise Russell taps into for the images he shot of the miniature buildings constructed and this year exhibited by local artist Ghostcat (Mike Beer). And so it should be: the buildings represented are no longer, victims of the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes. The miniatures―and the photographs that depict them―are literal snapshots of entities forever suspended…

The news of the sudden death of Greer Lascelles Twiss on 17 July has been met with great sadness throughout Aotearoa. He was awarded an ONZM in 2002 and received an Arts Foundation Icon Award in 2011. He was a leading figure in our art world and a national treasure. Born in Auckland in 1937 to parents who were skilled craftspeople, at the age of nine Greer’s lively theatrical puppet performances marked the beginning of his creative career. He graduated with honours from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1960, before training as a teacher, an experience he relished. He travelled to Europe and France on a study grant in 1965, and began lecturing at Elam the following year, becoming head of sculpture eight years later. Fellow lecturers included Colin…

In Culture that holds my family, her latest exhibition at Tim Melville Gallery, Salome Tanuvasa has presented a suite of ten paintings that reflect upon an encounter with her mother’s ngatu (the Tongan name for tapa). Tanuvasa’s work is typified by her interrogation of mark-making as an everyday practice, informed by the urgencies and limitations of her social and material environment. Now, Tanuvasa is reflecting on a moment of pause resulting from the passing of a close family member. The event required her mother to bring out of storage a valued collection of tapa and weaving. Rendered in shades of brown ochre, black, warm yellow and pink, the paintings home in on details within her mother’s ngatu: notches and gridded compositions, rounded and triangular motifs, and borders with bud-like embellishments…

The thing about Russell Moses is that he puts together two ways of making art—two very different motivations, actually—and ends up with something both personal and pertinent. The two ways are right there in the painting that gives his latest exhibition at Milford Galleries Dunedin its title: Glass Harbour (2024). The title covers one of the two ways. It refers to the Otago Harbour, a local landscape. Moses has lived and worked in Port Chalmers for ages. I can see the harbour as I write this, just up the road in Careys Bay, and it looks very like it does in Glass Harbour, even if that work is largely made up of polished stainless steel; it is bright grey (to crib a Phoenix Foundation song title) and has the same…

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened its Arts of Oceania galleries to the public on 31 May 2025, following some years renovating and the reimagining of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. Now better distinguished from the arts of Africa and the Ancient Americas, with which they shared the Wing since it opened in 1982, the galleries showcase more than 650 works made during the last 500 years, representing over 140 distinct cultures from the vast region. Under the curatorial leadership of Dr Maia Nuku (Ngāi Tai), John A. Friede and A.J. Hall Curator for the Arts of Oceania, as well as Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture, in collaboration with The Met’s Design Department, the galleries establish a new diagonal trajectory for the arts of Oceania, emphasising relationships and connectivity…