This morning I caught a slivery sniff of summer. The back door was open, it opens onto the porch, and through the gently oscillating rainbow coloured fly curtain, I caught a glimpse of a hazy blue sky. It’s on its way art lovers, the hot, sticky, slow-motioned heat of the high season. Enjoy the cooler moments and frosty mornings of spring, because soon we will be daydreaming about living in a chiller. On that note, a place that is always temperature controlled is a gallery; here are this month’s must-see shows.
Gow Langsford Gallery
Fragile Construction
Gregor Kregar
On until 15 October
Gregor Kregar works with an extensive range of media, from stainless and Cor-ten steel, glazed porcelain, and cast glass through to bronze and fiberglass. In his body of new work, Fragile Construction, Kregar transforms a series of tools into fragile, cast lead-crystal counterparts. The familiar spade, hammer or construction hat take on an absurdity in glass. Stripped of their functionality, Kregar questions our progress by marking its fragility.
28-36 Wellesley Street East
More info at gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz
Two Rooms Gallery
Mama ><Whenua
Peata Larkin
On until 15 October
Peata Larkin’s work operates in a space between binary constructions – Māori/Pākehā, past/present, art/science, matter/spirit – weaving cultures and spheres of knowledge together into new hybrid forms. The artist exploits the physical properties of paint. Pushing it through cavities, then slicing the mesh and canvas from the back to create painterly ‘pixels’ on the surface of each work. Larkin’s paintings reside at the junction of diverse visual and conceptual traditions. Cultural narratives from her Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, and Ngāti Tuhourangi background are encoded in patterns that allude to digital information, binary opposites, and the gridlines of weaving.
16 Putiki Street, Newton
More info at tworooms.co.nz
Artwork: Simon Kaan and Wi Taepa courtesy of Sanderson Contemporary
Two Rooms Gallery
Dreaming House
Veronica Herber
On until 15 October
“Within a rigorous set of limitations – fields of heavy cotton rag paper, washi tape, and graphite powder – Veronica Herber explores infinite variables within the open-ended structure of the grid. Her visuality is one that eschews the easy entertainments of lavish gestures and thrumming colours, or the lure of narrative – instead she tends to and preserves those minute ruptures or tremors that trouble the ordered regularity of the grid”. Excerpt from Limitless Variables of the Same by Dr Julia Teale.
16 Putiki Street, Newton
More info at tworooms.co.nz
Bergman Gallery Auckland
Aua e te fefe / Don’t Be Afraid
Raymond Sagapolutele
On until 22 October
“In my practice, the skulls are a key element in seeing beyond the dead, being about more than death. In the words of my grandmother, ‘aua e te fefe,’ don’t be afraid.” – Raymond Sagapolutele
Raymond Sagapolutele is a New Zealand-born Sāmoan artist with family ties to the villages of Fatuvalu in Savai’i and Saluafata in Upolu, Sāmoa. Sagapolutele presents skulls as timeless, holding space for ancestors to be part of a contemporary conversation, laying the groundwork for what is a possible future. The artist picked up the camera in 2003 and began a self-taught photography journey that would see him work with editorial publications Back to Basics and Rip It Up as a staff photographer as well as submissions to the NZ Herald and Metro magazine. Sagapolutele has exhibited images in a range of group and solo exhibitions both locally and internationally.
3/582 Karangahape Road (Entrance via 2 Newton Road), Grey Lynn
More info at bergmangallery.com
Sanderson Contemporary
Maumahara
Simon Kaan & Wi Taepa
On until 22 October
Maumahara brings together a selection of artworks that Kaan and Taepa have made in collaboration. Six new paintings and a selection of works on paper will feature by Kaan, alongside new ceramic works by Taepa. The title Maumahara, which translates to ‘to remember, to recall, to reminisce’, gestures to the notion of memory and how this can be rendered and manifest within one’s work. It also refers to Tuakana-Teina and the idea of knowledge and experience being recalled and then shared and passed down.
Kaan is known for his serene and dreamlike paintings and prints where land, sea and sky dominate, and the waka is a regular motif. In his paintings the artist juxtaposes panels alongside one another in parallel forms, while washes of Chinese ink are applied in intricate and delicate layers.
Wi Taepa ONZM is known for shaping clay by hand to make his vessels and sculptures. Drawing from his cultural heritage, Taepa features traditional Māori designs or re-designs traditional patterns to decorate his vessels.
2 Kent Street, Osborne Lane, Newmarket
More info at sanderson.co.nz
Foenander Galleries
Sunday Morning
Michael Dell
6-26 October
Dell’s placid pastoral landscapes bisected with roads feel familiar, though they could also be anywhere or nowhere at all. Behind the worked and muted surfaces the landscape becomes detached from narrative, like a faded memory, unanchored in time. Dell’s works are at once intimate and distant, his paintings, with their softened focus often appear as grainy photographic negatives or worn slides from the middle of the last century. The paintings appear degraded but are in fact meticulously created and then eroded away by the artist.
455 Mt Eden Road, Mt Eden
More info at foenandergalleries.co.nz
