Art New Zealand

Paratene Temokopuorongo Matchitt was born in Tokomaru Bay on 10 August 1933. Of Te Whānau-ā- Apanui, Te Whakatōhea and Ngāti Porou descent, he was a leading figure in contemporary Māori art for over five decades and a pioneer in the development of bo

Marilynn Webb (Te Roroa/Ngāpuhi) was a descendent of Moe Ngaherehe, the forty-seventh signatory of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. She spent her childhood in Ōpōtiki. She trained as an art educator and in 1958 joined the Auckland branch of Gordon Tovey’s Art a

Seven hundred years after the death of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) it is fitting that Roger Mortimer’s exhibition Pito-one: At the end of the beach vividly reimagines ‘danteisms’ that reflect our own inevitable journey towards death. Dante’s medieval

That Dame Robin White is going from strength to strength as an artist well into her eighth decade was powerfully attested in her recent exhibition Aio ngaira (this is us), at McLeavey Gallery, Wellington in August and September. Although it was sadly

Slow Wonder, a current showing of Bill Culbert’s photography and sculpture work at Auckland Art Gallery, is verily profound, insightful, and in its meeting or questioning of modern sensibilities, archaic. I do not mean that latter as a criticism eith

‘The Artist Has to Live like Everybody Else’. Two exhibitions have used this tagline as their title, one in 1993 at the Warwick Brown Gallery, a gallery now long gone. And one at Auckland Art Gallery, where it named Christina Barton’s 2015 retrospect

It has been over two decades since a Māori artist has received the prestigious Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. The full list of recipients stretches back to 1966 and is teeming with names, many of whom have shaped art in Aotearoa, an accolade shared by

The opening of veteran Māori artist Sandy Adsett’s retrospective, Toi Koru, on 31 July was a festive affair. The organisers apparently underestimated the volume of attendees: hundreds milled in outer rooms while the inner chamber was jam-packed for s

Over the last decade or so, a sense of momentum has gathered behind the position of Joanna Margaret Paul in New Zealand art history. Before, while there were certainly people who valued her work, Paul was a marginal figure, not least because she was

Anthony Davies is a printmaker, first and last. But this does not mean that his work can easily be recognised by his chosen medium. Chameleon-like, Davies moves from one genre of printmaking to another. Constantly setting himself new technical challe

A memorial is a means to make an absence present. Earlier this year Matt Pine oversaw the reinstatement of his memorial sculpture Cone Piece (1985/2021) to its rightful place in the Whanganui War Memorial Centre. It was taken down 18 years ago for cl

In Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s 2020 video work Mother Tongue, we watch from above as a small rowing boat circumnavigates the submerged wooden skeleton of a larger vessel. The wreck rests in water so shallow that fragments protrude from the ocean’s wind-blo

If the spirit of an age is a zeitgeist, then ours is surely a poltergeist. Noisy, disruptive and unwelcome, its clamour means it is impossible to ignore. Its footprint, or rather its bootprint, is all over curator Micheal Do’s brief to those particip

STOP. Take a moment to inhabit the space where you are right now; breathe the aromas, isolate the sounds, observe the play of light, find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Deborah Marshall’s abstract glimpses remind us to appreciate the apparently i

Don Abbott is Deputy Editor of Art New Zealand, and author of Vivid: The Paul Hartigan Story and Elizabeth Rees: I Paint. Kirsty Baker is a Wellington-based writer and art historian, whose research focuses on women artists in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The first thing to note about Ray Ching’s Fabled Lands is its huge size. Undoubtedly it is the biggest and heaviest (4.4 kilos) tome I have ever been asked to review. Its page dimensions are an impressive 330 x 280 mm and its thickness 60 mm. You nee

The place where architecture and art intersect is a rich one, and rarely documented with the kind of care and attention that went into The Architect and the Artists (Massey University Press, Auckland 2021). Bridget Hackshaw has collected a portrait o