Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
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
Whāia te Taniwha
Māori artists consider the enduring relevance of taniwha in Aotearoa.
E tuwhera ana te wharetoi i kā rā e 7 o te wiki, 10am - 5pm
Ka tuwhera ki te 9pm i kā pō Wenerei
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Uruka utukore, ahokore utukore
Free entry, free wifi
Collection
Louise Henderson Suddenly a lake appeared among the trees
Painted with her left hand while she recovered from a minor stroke, this important late triptych continued Henderson’s interest in the eye’s perception of overlapping and interlocking forms. Incorporating a finely observed colour palette and a sinuous play of forms across the three large panels, she creates a lively interplay between the smooth orange-grey trunks of light-dappled trees and fractured glimpses of bright blue water.
(Louise Henderson: From Life, 27 June – 11 October 2020)
Collection
Ivy Fife Otira Railway
Ivy Fife was a key member of the group later known as the Canterbury School, who strongly influenced each other in paying attention to buildings and industrial forms in familiar landscape surroundings. In this immaculately painted watercolour she expertly combined her facility in this medium with inventive construction, as a veering railway track swerves beyond the edges of the composition.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Collection
James Oram Simulacrum
Artist James Oram produces works that embrace the elegance of raw materials from which to draw out honest observations of modern living. This work is located within the tradition of the uninterrupted single take, no edits, preferring video as a direct document of an action over a constructed narrative.
Employing blue latex gloves and surgical tools, Oram carves a face from a square block of soap resting on a mirror to construct a clean, idealised version of himself. The work is reminiscent of lives configured for the best possible presence online, or of how we now protect ourselves when attending to daily banalities such as trips to the supermarket during lockdown. Either way our interface with the world has been transformed, what will the new you be like when we re-emerge in real life?!
Spheres: An Online Video Project, 2020
Collection
Nova Paul Still Light
Commissioned as a response to an untitled poem by artist Joanna Margaret Paul, Nova Paul’s Still Light is a reflection on the domestic and intimate. Shot in 16mm film, the camera traces around objects and follows light shifting across domestic surfaces, creating fluctuations in colour and flickering shadow. A fittingly tender soundtrack is provided by Nova’s friend and sometime collaborator Bic Runga.
The room is close with mystery this morning heavy green folds of velvet curtain are patterned with light the sky breaks in panes of almost blue & casts a white mirage upon the ceiling mirror filled with things the white dove-cote outhouse received from another window with its dark apertures a mound of sunlit ivy a light blue room caught, held in the round lid of some vessel open on the dressing table. Or so the room seems to be heavy & punctuated with mystery in the early stillness & I would drift out & put on the room, the day a close & heavy garment for my pregnancy, but the obdurate shape by my side prevents my peaceful mingling with the folded curtain & the light the mirror the window the pale day… Excerpt from untitled poem by Joanna Margaret Paul Like Love Poems: Selected Poems, Victoria University Press, 2006
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Artist Unknown, Carlo Dolci The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew
Carlo Dolci was the most sought-after Florentine painter of the Baroque era, and – like others of his standing – much copied and imitated. Dolci made three large versions of The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, the first in 1643 for Florentine merchant Paolo del Sera (now in Birmingham Museum and City Art Gallery) and another in 1646 for Marchese Carlo Gerini (now at the Palazzo Pitti, Florence), on which this work is based. Despite its 17th-century frame, it is thought to have been copied at the Pitti at least a century later. Andrew was a fisherman from Galilee in Israel, and is recorded in The Gospel of John as the first-named follower of Jesus Christ. In this painting, having lived an extraordinary life, he is to be killed for refusing to deny his risen Lord, under command of Ægeas, Roman governor at Patras in Greece, in about 60AD. Andrew’s robes are being removed as he kneels before the X-shaped cross on which he is about to be executed.
(As Time Unfolds, 5 December 2020 – 7 March 2021)
