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
Mervyn Williams Delta Series IV (Coil)
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label: “There’s a lot of formality and order and ritual in life. For example, getting up is a ritual and I can’t bear to have it interfered with. It’s the only time I feel I have control over events. The process is virtually the same every morning. […] From that order I have to go out to meet the chaos of the world about me.
“The grid is almost an emblem of reason. Its regularity, its predictability, its stability etc, are all about reason and organisation and holding together. But then there is in me another impulse which is basically lyrical; in fact it’s wildly expressionistic. I want both things. It’s the resolution of a dichotomy, and I’ve got to do it in painting.”
—Mervyn Williams, 1981
Collection
Ronnie van Hout The Thing
In 2007, Ronnie van Hout travelled to the Antarctic on an artist’s residency. He came back with the idea for The Thing, a work about isolation and paranoia which refers to the cult science-fiction film of the same name directed by John Carpenter in 1982 – once described as the most hated movie ever made. Based on a 1938 novella by John W. Campbell, Who Goes There, Carpenter’s film tells the story of a 10,000-year-old parasitic alien who infiltrates and imitates other life forms, throwing a remote colony of scientific researchers into murderous turmoil as they suspect each other in turn of having been assimilated. In Van Hout’s The Thing, a solitary figure who looks a lot like the artist sits glumly in a containment hut. We get the impression that he’s been there for some time, waiting in the dark. Has the Thing taken him over? Will we see it in one of the documentary videos screening nearby that reveal daily life in the ice-bound colony? The door to the hut is locked, and it seems sensible to keep it that way.
(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)
