What’s On
Dummies & Doppelgängers
The unforgettable art of being someone else.
Leo Bensemann: Paradise Garden
A collection of Leo Bensemann’s extraordinary Mohua Golden Bay landscape paintings.
Edwards + Johann: Mutabilities—propositions to an unknown universe
Transformation, unpredictability and magic happen when unrelated worlds meet.
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Free entry, free wifi
Peter Vangioni
Commentary
For the Price of a Pint of Beer
One of the joys of working at a public art gallery is the opportunity to really get to know an institution’s collection. I still remember, as a newly appointed curator of works on paper at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, coming across a cache of the brightest, most colourful and energetic prints I had ever seen among the Rex Nan Kivell collection of modern British prints. Given to the Gallery in 1953, the sheer breadth and depth of Nan Kivell’s incredibly comprehensive gift, especially when combined with the works he gave to Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, makes this a collection of British linocuts to rival those in major collections throughout the world.
Article
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Our expansive collection exhibition explores the fundamental role whenua plays in the visual language and identity of Aotearoa New Zealand. Acknowledging Māori as takata whenua, the first peoples to call this land home, themes of kaitiakitaka, colonisation, environmentalism, land use, migration, identity and belonging are considered through collection works, new acquisitions and exciting commissions. Painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, moving image, printmaking and weaving by historical and contemporary artists are brought together to reveal how land has been a material and subject for art in Aotearoa for hundreds of years. Here, the Gallery’s curators each take a closer look at a key work from the exhibition that tells us something about our complex relationship with the whenua.
Commentary
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Our expansive new collection exhibition explores the fundamental role whenua plays in the visual language and identity of Aotearoa New Zealand. Acknowledging Māori as takata whenua, the first peoples to call this land home, themes of kaitiakitaka, colonisation, environmentalism, land use, migration, identity and belonging are considered through collection works, new acquisitions and exciting commissions. Painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, moving image, printmaking and weaving by historical and contemporary artists are brought together to reveal how land has been a material and subject for art in Aotearoa for hundreds of years. Here, the Gallery’s curators each take a closer look at a key work from the exhibition that tells us something about our complex relationship with the whenua.
Commentary
The tide is in and the sea is like a blue mirror
I’ve always thought that if you’re a landscape artist, the working holiday must be the perfect getaway. You get to immerse yourself in an environment that may then become reflected in your art, a manifestation of your response and connection to a place. This was certainly the case for several Ōtautahi Christchurch landscape painters in the twentieth century: Doris Lusk and Onekakā, Bill Sutton and the Port Hills, Ivy Fife and the Canterbury High Country, Rita Angus and Wainui. For their close contemporary and friend Leo Bensemann it was Mohua Golden Bay, a landscape that had a profound effect on him when he holidayed there in the summer of 1965. It was a location he bonded with so much that he returned regularly to holiday and paint most summers for the rest of his life, in the process creating a remarkable body of over sixty paintings of the region.
Exhibition
Dear Shurrie: Francis Shurrock and his contemporaries
The art, influence and friendships of sculptor and teacher Francis Shurrock.
Exhibition
Leo Bensemann: Paradise Garden
A collection of Leo Bensemann’s extraordinary Mohua Golden Bay landscape paintings.
Exhibition
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Exploring the relationship between tākata and whenua – people and land – through Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
Exhibition
One O'Clock Jump: British Linocuts from the Jazz Age
Dynamic and vibrant prints from a fast-changing world.