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What’s On
Raymond McIntyre: A Modernist View
Dynamic and progressive paintings and woodcuts from one of Aotearoa’s New Zealand foremost modernist artists.
Living Archives
Archives that tell stories about artists and history in Aotearoa
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Exploring the relationship between tākata and whenua – people and land – through Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
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Artist Profile
Raymond McIntyre
It’s been too long a time between exhibitions for expatriate Waitaha Canterbury artist Raymond McIntyre (1879–1933) here at the Gallery. Although his work is regularly included in group exhibitions, the last focused survey was forty years ago when Raymond McIntyre toured to the Robert McDougall Art Gallery. Maybe a few of our readers remember this exhibition, but it feels like time he was introduced to a new audience.
He Kuru Pounamu
Jen Rendall (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Māmoe) has explored ancestral narratives and the entwinements of plant life, waterways and landscapes in her works for some time. As a member of Paemanu Ngāi Tahu Contemporary Visual Arts, she has participated in significant exhibitions which honour Kāi Tahu relationships to whenua, including Tauraka Toi: A Landing Place at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2021. More recently, her work was included in Kia Ora Whaea – an exploration of Māori motherhood and Indigenous perspectives and experiences of maternity shown at the Corban Estate Arts Centre in Tāmaki Makarau, which also included work by fellow Kāi Tahu contemporaries Turumeke Harrington and Alix Ashworth.
Whakahikohiko
On stepping into Francine Spencer’s home, what I notice first are the small, glittering points of light, scattered around the room like tiny, flickering whetū. But these aren’t gifts from Rakinui – these starlike specks are made of copper, Fran’s choice of material for her work in the upcoming exhibition Whāia te Taniwha.
Hye Rim Lee
The laptop fires up and a dreamlike virtual world materialises. Exquisite peacocks – glassy black, ethereal white – emerge on a moonlit stage, framed by icy blue branching patterns. A cast of swans glide through a luminous, rippling lake in measured arcs, their movements both urgent and graceful. In other scenes, two royal lovers – bound by fate, divided by unseen forces – circle one another, mirroring gestures of longing and hesitation.
Rooted in the Land
This article was written prior to the passing of Fred Graham on 9 May 2025. The author, Te Uru Contemporary Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery acknowledge this loss with deep sadness. Moe mai rā e te Rangatira.
In 2024 I was fortunate to work with senior Māori artist Fred Graham (Ngāti Korokī Kahukura, Tainui) and his whānau to present Fred Graham: Toi Whakaata / Reflections at Te Uru Contemporary Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Reflecting on Graham’s career, the exhibition brings together works made over the course of almost fifty years between 1965 and 2013.
Unfamiliars
One size doesn’t necessarily fit all. Amongst other ideas, our current exhibition Dummies & Doppelgängers explores how imagined or altered identities can help artists construct worlds that better accommodate them or others. Here, the exhibition’s curator Felicity Milburn considers how this dynamic plays out in the work of two of the featured artists.
Flitting, Gliding, Strutting, Cavorting
Ranking highly among the privately-owned works of art that have fallen across this curator’s path is an exquisite late-Georgian era album of Indian bird watercolours. This significant, previously unpublished folio contains twenty-five delicate watercolours and three small lithographs. Most paintings were produced collaboratively in 1826 by an interesting couple, Elizabeth (Eliza) Jane D’Oyly and her husband Charles Walter D’Oyly, the latter recognised in India as “perhaps the most famous of the amateur British artists who depicted the Indian scene.” A treasured gift from Elizabeth to her sister Isabella Gilbert in 1866, the album has stayed in the same family since then. It also carries sombre themes alongside its splendours.
Spring Time is Heart-break
In anticipation of our major summer exhibition, curatorial assistant Jane Wallace talked to five of the artists involved in the show. Working across a range of media, the twenty-five contemporary artists in Spring Time is Heart-break have a shared interest in storytelling. They consider ideas around communication, distance, memory, the body and materiality, generating works that gently reveal contemporary forms of image-making and circulation. How can we communicate through time, or in a different tongue? What do materials reveal to us as they are transformed from one state to another? From rimurapa harvesting to cavorting queer tableaux and fish ‘n’ chips, Heidi Brickell (Te Hika o Papauma, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tara, Rangitāne, Rongomaiwahine, Ngāti Apakura), Priscilla Rose Howe, Lucy Meyle, and Steven Junil Park and John Harris share their energetic practices – a small glimpse of what will be on display this November.
Everythingism
In 2019, the Tate Modern staged a solo exhibition of the work of Russian artist Natalia Goncharova. It was the first time the artist had had a major retrospective in the UK, and the exhibition included her paintings, prints, costume designs and textiles. The exhibition presented reviewers with a twinned challenge: how to talk about an artist who was so little known in the UK, and one who was a woman?
Larence Shustak
Welcome to the world of Larence Shustak—a rule-breaker and image-maker who came of age in the creative cauldron that was New York City in the 1950s. He used a camera as a paintbrush, documenting as well as creatively interpreting his subjects: street people and nudes. Old folks and children. Jazz legends.