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.
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Ka tuwhera ki te 9pm i kā pō Wenerei
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
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Free entry, free wifi
Notes
Slow-mo-tastic
My friend's daughter visited our ArtBox show Burster Flipper Wobbler Dripper Spinner Stacker Shaker Maker (on till September 28!) on a school trip recently and was captivated by Steve Carr's Screen Shots videos, in which a paint-filled balloon bursts in super slow motion.
Collection
Colin McCahon Kauri tree landscape
Poet Charles Brasch described the distinctive Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland light Colin McCahon captured in his Titirangi paintings as airy and atmospheric, capable of dissolving the solid hills, forests and water into “a kind of brilliant prismatic dance”. McCahon lived in the Titirangi area between 1953 and 1959, and made numerous studies in the kauri forests of the Waitakere district, fascinated by how the sunlight streaming through the high, delicate canopy turned the kahere into a field of shimmering geometric forms. Here, the abstracted shapes of the forest rise up towards the fragmented sky, creating an effervescent play of warmth, movement and light.
kahere ~ forest
(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)
Interview
Thieves in the attic
An unlikely domesticity pervades the small city studio. Drawings and photographed collages are bulldogclipped and hung against the wall. Odd-shaped articles are crammed into stacks of Dole banana boxes. Large cardboard cartons, colour-coded in capital letters – 'BLACK COSTUMES'; 'RED' – are piled up near the ceiling. The props, costumes, photographs and books, the disparate resources that feed into the free-ranging eclecticism that defines the playful, performative and exhaustively explorative collaborations of Edwards + Johann, are boxed up and put away.
Today, I am told, is talking day.
Article
The pleasure of making: objects taking centre stage in the space of the art gallery
Was it serendipity that the opening of Christchurch Art Gallery's Burster Flipper Wobbler Dripper Spinner Stacker Shaker Maker coincided with that of Slip Cast, a group exhibition at the Dowse Art Museum that also focused on the pleasure that artists take in manipulating materials in the process of making art?
Article
Transformers
Curator Ken Hall writes about his experience of working with artists Chris Heaphy and Sara Hughes, as part of a small team with other city council staff and Ngāi Tahu arts advisors, on the Transitional Cathedral Square artist project.
My Favourite
Wayne Youle's The Saviour
Many months after the major February earthquake, we were told by the authorities that we were allowed to salvage whatever we could from our business – provided it fitted into a single wheelie bin.
Notes
Baseland
Gallery staff are busy behind the scenes at the moment preparing for the installation of Shane Cotton's exhibition Baseland which opens at our Tuam street gallery and the Ilam Campus Gallery at the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury on 7 June.
Notes
Miniature canvas
Artists you may associate with very big canvases, also worked on very small ones
