Protest Paintings: Jacqueline Fahey

Gow Langsford is pleased to present a major exhibition surveying the work of Jacqueline Fahey from the 1950s to the present day. Protest Paintings brings together works spanning over seven decades of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most distinctive and celebrated artistic voices. Now in her late nineties, Fahey is one of few female career artists of her generation whose unflinching eye for the social and political world around us has only grown more piercing with time.

As Director Anna Jackson notes in the accompanying exhibition catalogue; “It is a privilege, in the course of a career, to work closely with an artist whose life and practice have made a lasting contribution to the cultural life of this country. For me, that artist is Jacqueline Fahey.”

Long celebrated for her depictions of suburban domestic life and the emotional complexities of motherhood, Fahey’s practice has also consistently engaged with wider social and political realities. Across decades, she has remained fiercely committed to truth-telling through paint, approaching even the most intimate subjects as acts of resistance and critique. Refusing sentimentality in favour of candour, intellect and emotional precision, Fahey has herself explained: “all my paintings are protest paintings.”

Her paintings crackle with noise and presence – figures caught mid-sentence, mouths open, eyes ablaze, the clatter of crockery, the clink of gin bottles, conversations that press against the walls and burst through open windows into gardens, out into the street, into the outside world. Later works carry this electric charge into urban environments, where the tensions of private life erupt into public space. Recognisable for their cacophonous colour, exacting detail and a perspectival compression that draws the viewer in, Fahey’s paintings are impossible to look away from.

The exhibition includes significant works on loan from both public and private collections, alongside one new work titled Juxtaposition (2025). Each painting reaffirms her command of the medium, together bearing witness to a practice of ferocious vitality and unwavering courage. As Jackson observes: “This exhibition is not only a presentation of remarkable paintings; it is a testament to endurance, integrity and the uncompromising pursuit of truth through painting. Time has not softened Jacqueline’s vision; it has sharpened our ability to see it.”