As a young boy, Reuben Paterson used to play with the sparkling black sand on Piha beach; now as an artist he often uses glitter in his works. In this one, he took inspiration from Māori mythology connected with water, cleansing, transformation and stars. Pūtahitanga can mean constellation. Rehua was a son of Rangi-nui (the sky father) and Papa-tū-ā-nuku (the earth mother), and is associated in Tūhoe legend with the star Antares. To make this dazzling kaleidoscopic landscape, Paterson digitally layered and rearranged his own drawings. He likens the shifting black and white patterns to the restless energies and histories that have unfolded on the whenua (land) of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their optical push-and-pull highlights that what can be seen depends on who is doing the looking. What catches your eye?

(Wheriko - Brilliant! 17 May 2019 – 16 February 2020)

Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016

Packed with an energetic sense of movement, Simon Morris’s painting gives the effect of a boldly rhythmic musical score. Its pattern, appearing at first to be random or chaotic, is found to be sequenced and repeating, and with diagonals regularly breaking up the picture plane.

Morris builds on the legacy of pioneering New Zealand geometric abstractionists such as Carl Sydow and Gordon Walters. This optical sequence was generated by a mathematical formula, which he says “creates images that I wouldn’t come up with myself. It’s like the system partly makes the work.”

Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016

The repurposed drumskin became a signature motif for Auckland-based Julian Dashper, whose conceptual art practice saw him develop an international exhibiting profile in the United States, Australia and Europe, before his untimely death in 2009.

Resonating with the American pop artist Jasper Johns’ 1950s target paintings, Dashper’s drumskin canvases were also made to honour a band of New Zealand’s pioneering modernists. In 1992 The Big Bang Theory saw him assembling full drumkits emblazoned with his heroes’ names: The Anguses, The Hoteres, The Colin McCahons, The Woollastons and The Drivers.

This screenprint by English artist Bridget Riley presents a compressed, iridescent concertina of aqua green bands, wedged between tapering lines of orange and candy pink. Bridget’s major international debut was in The Responsive Eye, an exhibition held in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she showed two large, powerfully optical works in black-and-white and grey. She began creating related sharp-edged optical works in pure colour two years later.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

Colin McCahon was an important figure in Jonathan Mane-Wheoki’s (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kuri) life – first a family friend when Mane-Wheoki’s family moved to Titirangi in the 1950s, and then a teacher when he attended the night classes McCahon taught in the attic of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. While he was a student at the University of Canterbury, Mane-Wheoki frequently visited the Robert McDougall Art Gallery to view McCahon’s Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is, and the work held a special place in his heart. The other two works shown here were purchased when Mane-Wheoki was in London studying at the Courtauld Institute of Art. While there, he was commissioned by the cDougall Gallery to purchase works for the collection. In 1974, Mane-Wheoki recommended the entire budget he had available be allocated for the purchase of this Degas etching, and the following year he secured this Andy Warhol print, both small yet exemplary international works.

(Living Archives, 25 October 2025 – 8 March 2026, exhibited alongside 'Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is' by Colin McCahon and 'Manet assis, tourné à droite' by Edgar Degas)