What’s On
New exhibition opening soon
From Here on the Ground
The Design Store is having a revamp!
We'll be closed while we get a fresh new look. Visit us again from 14 May.
Exhibition closing soon
Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Free entry, free wifi
Exhibition
Reuben Paterson: The End
Reuben Paterson's sparkling elevator installation offers an unexpected space for contemplation and connection.
Exhibition
Untitled (Bathers)
Séraphine Pick's lush watercolour offers a utopian vision in the car park elevator.
Interview
Silent Patterns
When we asked Tony de Lautour to produce a new work for the Bunker—the name Gallery staff give to the small, square elevator building at the front of the forecourt on Montreal Street—he proposed a paint scheme inspired by Dazzle camouflage. Associated with the geometric near-abstraction of the vorticist movement, Dazzle was developed by British and American artists during the First World War to disguise shipping. It was a monumental form of camouflage that aimed not to hide the ship but to break up its mass visually and confuse enemies about its speed and direction. In a time before radar and sonar were developed, Dazzle was designed to disorientate German U-boat commanders looking through their periscopes, and protect the merchant fleets.
Senior curator Lara Strongman spoke with Tony de Lautour in late January 2016.
Notes
The House of Wellbeing
On Saturday, I spoke at the launch of a major new work of art in public space—Wayne Youle's installation The House of Wellbeing ALL WELCOME, at the CPIT Aoraki campus on Madras Street.
Article
Twenty days in China and Japan
After ten days in China—where we visited an artist’s studio in a half-empty compound of 140 multi-storey buildings, a private museum of antiquities in a sky-scraper and a tiny artist-run space in a hutong (alleyway), and met writers and curators and art dealers and collectors all over Shanghai and Beijing, with a side trip to Nanjing—I wrote an anguished note to myself: how will I write an article about all this that’s not just a list?
Notes
Port Hills From Bryndwr by Archibald Nicoll
This article first appeared as 'Archibald Nicoll's Colourful Life' in The Press on 5 May 2015.