Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Disruptive Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Japan
Quietly powerful and immersive video works revealing the politics behind our view of landscape.
John Vea: Ini Mini Mani Mou
Powerful new work examining the complexities of the immigration process in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Dear Shurrie
The art, influence and friendships of sculptor and teacher Francis Shurrock
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Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
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Free entry, free wifi
Notes
When is a dog a mouse?
Throughout the centuries man has delighted in creating representations of his canine companions.
Collection
Bill Hammond Living Large 6
There’s no big break. It’s just a slow game. —Bill Hammond, 2002
Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums (3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020)
Exhibition
Menagerie: Animals from the Gallery's Permanent Collections
Menagerie brings together 17 historical and contemporary paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture from the Gallery's Permanent Collections, all of which feature an animal of some description, from cats, dogs and birds to horses, bulls, fish and even a hippopotamus!
Collection
Steve Carr A Shot in the Dark (Bear Rug)
Apparently testing the limits of incorrectness, Auckland-based multimedia artist Steve Carr commissioned a skilled woodcarver to realise his highly improbable carved bearskin rug.
Bearskin rugs during the Victorian and Edwardian era craze for taxidermy were almost a standard feature in British country houses, typically in a gentleman’s trophy room or study. They came to symbolise wild nature and distant lands, ultimately tamed. Carr’s project, however, has little to do with tameness, either in conception or in its surprisingly lifelike growling effect
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
Francis Upritchard Wife
Francis Upritchard is a fascinated and perceptive observer of people and other animals. Her works often capture behaviours and expressions that are shared across species. As primates, humans and monkeys are, of course, especially alike. Upritchard’s baboon spouses are persuasively individual – absorbed in their own thoughts and worlds, just like the rest of us.
(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)
Collection
Francis Upritchard Husband
Francis Upritchard is a fascinated and perceptive observer of people and other animals. Her works often capture behaviours and expressions that are shared across species. As primates, humans and monkeys are, of course, especially alike. Upritchard’s baboon spouses are persuasively individual – absorbed in their own thoughts and worlds, just like the rest of us.
(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)
Collection
Michael Parekowhai My Sister, My Self
Michael Parekowhai’s My Sister, My Self recalls a once-common sight in suburban New Zealand front gardens: the concrete seal with a chrome ball on its nose, a home-grown version of the performing circus seal. Connecting to other histories, it also recalls the kekeno, the New Zealand fur seal, which had an unfortunate central role in our pre-colonial past.
At the pinnacle of this spectacular balancing act is a replica of the artist Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1913 Bicycle Wheel – a bicycle wheel upside down on a wooden stool. Duchamp made it for his own pleasure – he liked spinning the wheel in his studio – and later described it as his first ‘readymade’.
(Beasts)
Collection
Betty Harrison Persimmon (Study of a Racehorse)
Chrystabel Aitken and Betty Harrison both grew up in rural communities where they developed a great love of animals – an interest they both explored as students studying sculpture under Shurrock at the Canterbury College School of Art during the 1920s and 30s. Aitken’s interest in the natural world was manifest in her sculptures, prints, applied arts and ceramics, most of which focused on depictions of animals. A Bull is her tribute to the famous nineteenth-century French painter and sculptor of animals, Rosa Bonheur. Aitken flourished under Shurrock and in 1926 was appointed his assistant at the art school, leading to a close friendship for the remainder of their lives. Harrison studied sculpture under Shurrock. Persimmon (Study of a Racehorse) suggests a talented, promising student, but she decided to change career paths in the 1930s to become a nurse. Harrison died tragically young in 1937, aged just twenty-five.
(Dear Shurrie: Francis Shurrock and his contemporaries, 8 March – 13 July 2025)