Exhibitions

ART FOR GOOD

A Collaborative Charity Art Auction Benefitting Kindness Collective 31 Oct - 7 Nov 2024 Onehunga Gow Langsford are delighted to support New Zealand charity Kindness Collective this November. Hosted at Gow Langsford’s flagship premises in Onehunga and generously supported by Art+Object and Studio Art Supplies , a selection of artworks created specifically for the event by leading Aotearoa artists including John Pule, Matthew Browne,... Read more

Sunrise of Fog and Dreams

André Hemer 23 Oct - 23 Nov 2024 Auckland City Since the early 2000s, André Hemer has emerged as a key figure in the hybrid exploration of contemporary image-making, known for his amalgamations of traditional techniques with modern technologies. This new body of paintings showcases a dynamic evolution, characterized by flat surfaces that shift away from the three-dimensional forms of... Read more

New Painting

Shane Cotton 12 Oct - 16 Nov 2024 Onehunga Shane Cotton's New Painting delves into the collision of Indigenous and European time systems, warping time, memory, and nature through the lens of his Ngāpuhi whakapapa. His new works place ancestral figures in surreal, cosmic landscapes, exploring hybridities, transformation, and the cyclical nature of history. Cotton’s paintings blend history, mythology, and technicolour imagery, reflecting on the layered, nonlinear relationship between the past, present, and future in Aotearoa. Read more

In The Stars I Trust

Reuben Paterson 7 - 20 Oct 2024 Offsite Nearly thirty-five years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope launched from Merritt Island, Florida, and after correcting its flawed optics, provided detailed images that have helped answer longstanding astrophysical questions. Reuben Paterson, an Auckland-born artist of Māori and Scottish descent, responds to these so-called answers with deeper imagination. His series In The Stars I Trust features ten mixed-media paintings based on constellations captured by the Hubble, viewed from a Southern Hemisphere perspective. Read more

Spring Catalogue 2024

Group Exhibition 25 Sep - 19 Oct 2024 Auckland City Gow Langsford's annual Spring Catalogue exhibition for 2024 presents a remarkable collection of works by some of New Zealand's most celebrated artists. This exhibition offers a rich cross-section of Aotearoa’s artistic legacy, showcasing prominent pieces by Bill Hammond, Karl Maughan, Gretchen Albrecht, Dame Louise Henderson, Tony Fomison, Toss Woollaston, and others. Spanning through to the early 21st century, this collection of works offers a captivating journey through the evolution of New Zealand's visual art, showcasing the depth, diversity, and enduring impact of these revered artists. Read more

Erotic Geologies

Natalie Tozer 21 Sep - 5 Oct 2024 Onehunga Erotic Geologies is a sci-fi parable that seeks knowledge from the underground. Shifting through an otherworldly landscape where rocky outcrops meet tumultuous skies, the setting of the film makes reference to post-earthquake Ōtautahi in Te Waipounamu and the Tongariro Crossing in Te Ika-a-Māui. The narrative follows protagonists Rangi and... Read more

Dawn and Dusk

Paul Dibble 21 Sep - 5 Oct 2024 Onehunga Haeata/Dawn and Porehu/Dusk (2002)continues Paul Dibble’s exploration of seated figures, a theme he has revisited since the mid-90s. A reinterpretation of Michelangelo’s figures from the Medici tomb, the work explores classical European art history through the lens of New Zealand's cultural landscape. The figures are cast in bronze and presented... Read more

We are nourished by the unknown

Patricia Piccinini 28 Aug - 21 Sep 2024 Auckland City The central focus of Patricia Piccinini's first solo exhibition at Gow Langsford, We are nourished by the unknown, is her major 2023 work The Bridge. In this work a life-sized female character sits cradling a hybrid animal-human creature. The composition evokes Dutch renaissance depictions of the Good Samaritan, with the woman’s warmth juxtaposed against the unsettling animalness of the creature, challenging us to display the same compassion for difference that they do. The exhibition also showcases smaller sculptures The Pacifist, The Protégé and Safely Together alongside works on paper and hand blown glass works. Read more

A Moment in Time: Dashper, Reynolds, Maddox

Celebrating the Chartwell Collection 24 Aug - 14 Sep 2024 Onehunga Last year, The Chartwell Collection invited Galleries across Aotearoa to participate in a yearlong celebration of their 50th Anniversary. Fittingly, their initiative put the focus on artists and highlighted the integral role of dealer galleries in how they built their collection. The Chartwell Collection began in Hamilton in the early... Read more

Gordon Walters

31 Jul - 24 Aug 2024 Auckland City Gordon Walters (1919-1995) was a pioneer who is widely recognised and celebrated as one of New Zealand’s most significant modernist artists. Walters’ career spanned over five decades and from 2017-2019 the comprehensive survey exhibition Gordon Walters: New Vision was developed and toured in partnership by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Read more

Sam Harrison

31 Jul - 24 Aug 2024 Auckland City Christchurch based artist Sam Harrison is a craftsman in every sense of the word. He is a master of many mediums, working across bronze, concrete and plaster along with watercolour and printmaking techniques. Harrison’s works have a raw, emotive quality, which is underpinned by meticulous attention to detail. The works presented in his second solo exhibition with Gow Langsford continue his exploration of the human figure. Read more

Illuminations

Yafeng Duan 20 Jul - 17 Aug 2024 Onehunga The first solo exhibition of Chinese born, Berlin based Yafeng Duan to be presented in Aotearoa. Read more

Hang In Any Order

Richard Killeen 3 - 27 Jul 2024 Auckland City Gow Langsford is pleased to present an exhibition of artworks by Richard Killeen. The exhibition includes several of Killeen’s distinctive cut-outs, which range in date from 1981 to 2002. Read more

Attraction and Transmission

David McCracken 15 Jun - 13 Jul 2024 Onehunga Attraction and Transmission presents a new exhibition of large-scale sculptures by Auckland based artist David McCracken. This body of works develops and extends themes from McCracken’s 2020 solo exhibition with Gow Langsford, Exalt in Transmission. McCracken derives the forms of his sculptural objects from mechanical origins – one can detect underlying reference to engine belts, cogs, and other machine elements. These everyday objects are worked through an artistic process and transformed into monumental sculptures fabricated from Corten steel. Read more

Hands of Gold

Max Gimblett 5 - 29 Jun 2024 Auckland City Gow Langsford is delighted to present Hands of Gold, an exhibition of new works by Max Gimblett. Hands of Gold features a stunning array of paintings, the majority of which take the quatrefoil shape – a hallmark of Gimblett’s oeuvre. While this essential form repeats, the treatment of surface varies considerably from work to work. There are evenly surfaced monochromes, grid-like patterns, and extravagantly gestural brush strokes in a rich array of colours. What shines through in this diverse range of approaches to painting is the quality of Gimblett’s craft and his distinctive artistic vision. Read more

Haia

John Pule 11 May - 8 Jun 2024 Onehunga Haia brings together a body of recent paintings and drawings by John Pule. With bursts of bright colour, painterly suggestions of water, vast tropical vegetation and silhouetted human figures, the works presented in Haia further the rich artistic vision that has made Pule a widely celebrated artist in Aotearoa and beyond. Read more

I stain my heart with thoughts of you so resistant

Aiko Robinson 8 May - 1 Jun 2024 Auckland City Boldly erotic yet delicately intricate, I stain my heart with thoughts of you so resistant is Aiko Robinson’s first solo exhibition at Gow Langsford. Read more

Five Figures

Group Exhibition 8 May - 1 Jun 2024 Auckland City Five Figures brings together a selection of figurative works by notable women artists. It includes work by Jacqueline Fahey, Dame Louise Henderson, Ayesha Green, Nicky Hoberman, and Jenny Watson. Read more

Collective Visions

New & Recent Works by Represented Artists 10 Apr - 4 May 2024 Auckland City Collective Visions showcases new and recent works from many of the artists in our Gallery stable, including Dick Frizzell, Reuben Paterson, Graham Fletcher, Hugo Koha Lindsay, Virginia Leonard, Gregor Kregar, Matthew Browne, David McCracken, Chris Heaphy, Max Gimblett, Michael Hight, Karl Maughan, and newly announced represented artist, Patricia Piccinini. Read more

This Must Be the Place

Inaugural Exhibition 6 Apr - 4 May 2024 Onehunga This Must Be the Place is the inaugural exhibition at Gow Langsford’s flagship Onehunga premises. It brings together the work of a diverse range of artists who respond to themes of place, belonging, and cultural legacy. In examining locality in Aotearoa and Oceania through a modern and contemporary lens, This Must Be the Place showcases a diverse range of practices and contextual frameworks from the region. Read more

The First Days in a Strange New Land

Chris Heaphy 13 Mar - 6 Apr 2024 Auckland City Chris Heaphy has been active as an artist for more than three decades. During that time, he has created a significant body of highly engaging artwork. Visually and conceptually nuanced, his work has examined themes of time, place, and memory. These themes have remained consistent while the artist has moved through several different approaches to image-making. Read more

The Plimsoll Line

Hugo Koha Lindsay 14 Feb - 9 Mar 2024 Auckland City The Plimsoll Line presents Hugo Koha Lindsay’s latest body of paintings. These works bear a visual relationship to earlier iterations of his practice – with monochromatic or dichromatic palettes, clusters of abstract markings, and a clean, considered aesthetic. Yet, they differ in the level of intent behind the mark making. Lindsay’s earlier works made use of incidental processual markings, whereas the paintings in The Plimsoll Line feature more deliberate impressions. Read more

Flora & Fauna

Zadok Ben-David 14 Feb - 6 Mar 2024 Auckland City Gow Langsford is thrilled to present Flora & Fauna, a selection of artworks by London-based artist Zadok Ben-David. Active since the late 1970s, Ben-David has exhibited in a broad range of international contexts where his work has met widespread acclaim. The intricately painted stainless steel artworks presented in Flora & Fauna provide a compelling view of the artist’s practice, showcasing the technical and conceptual finesse that has underpinned his global success. Flora & Fauna is Ben-David’s first exhibition in New Zealand. Read more

Summer Paintings

Group Exhibition 17 Jan - 10 Feb 2024 Auckland City Gow Langsford is pleased to present Summer Paintings. This exhibition presents a selection of paintings from six painters – Dale Frank, Séraphine Pick, Judy Millar, Ruth Ige, Karl Maughan, and Allen Maddox. The works are eclectic in style, ranging from the Maughan’s meticulously detailed 1997 gardenscape Ashurst through to Millar’s mesmerising Rows for Gertrude Stein, a monochromatic gestural painting from 2002. Each of the paintings demonstrate the skill, flair, and distinctive vision of the artist behind them. Read more

Rhododendrons

Karl Maughan 6 Dec 2023 - 13 Jan 2024 Auckland City New exhibition of garden landscape paintings by Karl Maughan at Gow Langsford Gallery. Read more

Summer Editions

Group Exhibition 6 Dec 2023 - 10 Feb 2024 Auckland City We are delighted to present Summer Editions. This exhibition features editioned works by Gow Langsford artists, including John Pule, Max Gimblett, Reuben Paterson, Dick Frizzell, Brett Graham, and Gregor Kregar, as well as prints by famed NZ artists Don Binney and Pat Hanly. Read more

The Creamiest

Reuben Paterson 15 Nov - 2 Dec 2023 Auckland City New exhibition of works by Reuben Paterson. The Creamiest at Gow Langsford Gallery. Read more

Life Is Understood In Circles

Grace Wright 15 Nov - 2 Dec 2023 Auckland City Life Is Understood In Circles is a new exhibition of works by Grace Wright. Read more

Today

Sara Hughes 18 Oct - 11 Nov 2023 Auckland City Sara Hughes presents Today, a new series of paintings at Gow Langsford Gallery. Read more

Skyscapes

André Hemer 18 Oct - 11 Nov 2023 Auckland City New screenprint series by Vienna based acclaimed artist André Hemer. Read more

Revisiting Modernism

Group Exhibition 27 Sep - 14 Oct 2023 Auckland City Revisiting Modernism will present a selection of work by some of New Zealand’s best women modernists. It includes works by well-known artists, Angus, Henderson, and Hodgkins, and some whose standing is increasingly acknowledged, such as A. Lois White, Adele Younghusband, and Jacqueline Fahey. It also makes room for revisiting the work of some figures who haven’t attracted much in the way of scholarship or acclaim, such as Ruth Browne, Jean Horsley and Gabrielle Hope. Read more

Spectral Evidence

Virginia Leonard 30 Aug - 23 Sep 2023 Auckland City Virginia Leonard’s ceramic works are ornate wonders. Their appearance could resemble sea creatures, or tropical vegetation, or perhaps even alien life. Colourful, sharp, seemingly floral and often gilded, the works have a fantastical quality and an aesthetic sensibility that borders on the Baroque. Read more

Stockroom Selects

Group Exhibition 30 Aug - 20 Sep 2023 Auckland City Stockroom Selects showcases a range of recent works by gallery artists, Max Gimblett, Sara Hughes, Dale Frank, Reuben Paterson and André Hemer. Read more

Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension

Simon Ingram 9 - 26 Aug 2023 Auckland City New exhibition of works by Auckland artist Simon Ingram. Read more

Four Paintings, Four Sitters

Charles F. Goldie 9 - 26 Aug 2023 Auckland City The paintings included in Goldie: Four Paintings, Four Sitters provide a compelling view of the technical virtuosity and distinctive subject matter that made Goldie famous. These works range in date from 1910 to 1918, which situates them in the most productive and esteemed period of the artist’s production. Read more

Between Waking and Dreaming

Antonio Murado 12 Jul - 5 Aug 2023 Auckland City The works presented in Between Waking and Dreaming further Murado’s exploration of his ‘blown paint’ technique. By blowing liquid paint across pale, semi-transparent backgrounds, Murado creates paint impressions that can be read as flower petals, seemingly floating across the vigorously painted background, which could be read as cascading water. Though this impression is more interpretive than literal. In another sense, these works could be read in terms of gestural abstraction. Whichever way one choses to read them, these paintings are lyrical and immersive. Read more

Works on Paper

Dame Louise Henderson 12 Jul - 5 Aug 2023 Auckland City Works on paper by Dame Louise Henderson Read more

Huia Sings Alone

Paul Dibble 14 Jun - 8 Jul 2023 Auckland City Paul Dibble is a leading figure of his generation, having created a rich body of sculptural works for public and private contexts over the course of decades. The artist is particularly well-known for his large-scale, cast bronze sculptures, though he is also well-versed in working on a domestic scale. Key themes in Dibble’s work include native flora and fauna, cultural history, architecture, and the human figure. Read more

Requiem

Ralph Hotere 14 Jun - 8 Jul 2023 Auckland City Gow Langsford Gallery is delighted to present Ralph Hotere: Requiem, an exhibition of selected works by the distinguished artist. Hotere is widely considered to be one of the all-time greats of New Zealand art, and his work is held in institutional and private collections throughout the country. Hotere is perhaps best known for his dark palette abstract works, which were often painted with automotive lacquer. Read more

Silience

Matthew Browne 17 May - 10 Jun 2023 Auckland City Matthew Browne’s paintings presented in Silience provide excellent cases in point. On one level, these paintings present hard-edged arrangements of colour and form with a meticulous evenly finished application of paint. By this reading, the works are overtly formalist, and connected to a long tradition of abstract painting, meshed in a discourse of surface, colour, form, and grids. But, in their subtleties, there is also something more open-ended and exploratory at play. Browne has described a process that starts in exploring formal relationships in colour and form but develops greater complexity as the work progresses. Read more

Manifesto!

Jacqueline Fahey 17 May - 10 Jun 2023 Auckland City Gow Langsford Gallery is proud to present Manifesto!, Jacqueline Fahey’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.This exhibition shows works from a broad cross section of the distinguished painter’s career output, with works dating from the early 1970s up until the present. Manifesto! highlights Fahey's artistic vision, technical finesse, and the diverse range of content that she has engaged with over the decades. Read more

Allen Maddox

19 Apr - 13 May 2023 Auckland City This exhibition features works by Allen Maddox from the mid-1970s through to the 1990s. It was a prolific period for the artist, whereby his chosen motif was first explored and then further developed. Read more

Twilight's Edge

Graham Fletcher 19 Apr - 13 May 2023 Auckland City Aptly titled, Twilight’s Edge is a series of dimly lit landscapes from Ōtepoti Dunedin-based painter Graham Fletcher. Read more

Michael Hight

22 Mar - 15 Apr 2023 Auckland City For this exhibition of new paintings, Michael Hight returns to well-known hyperreal landscapes, inspired by South Island imagery from Glenorchy to the Buller River. Read more

Intimate Perspectives: Small Sculptural Objects

Group Exhibition 22 Mar - 15 Apr 2023 Auckland City The exhibition features a variety of small sculptures and offers an alternative and intimate perspective to a genre, often focused on large-scale. The objects presented in the exhibition are small and inherently tactile, with their appearance informed by the way they were created. The artists have used different materials such... Read more

Serenity

Max Gimblett 22 Feb - 18 Mar 2023 Auckland City This exhibition is made up of a series of small new paintings by Max Gimblett. It encompasses his signature shaped canvas, the quatrefoil, along with Enso tondo works and rectangles in a mix of bright hues and reticent gold gilding. His unique blend of Eastern philosophy, calligraphy, and abstraction has made him one of this country’s most recognised and respected artists of his generation. Read more

Colin McCahon

22 Feb - 18 Mar 2023 Auckland City This exhibition is made up of works from two seminal series by Colin McCahon (1919-1987); The Flight From Egypt, 1980 and Angels and Bed, 1976-1977. Both created toward the end of his painting career, they show a deep engagement with the spiritual and emotional dimension of human experience and evidence a lifetime spent asking questions through painting. Read more

Flow

Group Exhibition 18 Jan - 18 Feb 2023 Auckland City Bringing together internationally renowned artists Anish Kapoor (India/UK), Bosco Sodi (Mexico), Dale Frank (Australia) and Bernard Frize (France), Flow is an exploration of colour, surface and materiality. Read more

Karl Maughan

7 - 23 Dec 2022 Auckland City There is a permanence to Karl Maughan’s gardens which is bewitching. His evergreen trees, ever pink flowers, ever blue skies. They are like peering through a window into a paradisiacal world where nothing ever withers or decays. This new series from the Wellington-based artist takes us ever-deeper into his painted illusions. These gardens don’t stop at the swollen bushes and plump florals but descend farther into the forest, where the shadows are more dramatic under the leafy canopies. We are drawn deeper within Maughan’s horticultural landscape, towards the knowing peaks beyond. Read more

Notations

Hugo Koha Lindsay 7 - 23 Dec 2022 Auckland City Primarily an abstract painter, Hugo Koha Lindsay’s (Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Maru) practice explores concepts of mapping within a cognitive and spatial framework. Lindsay is interested in the shifting ambience of the city, with traces of the urban environment or allusions to its planning, construction, and our interactions with it often apparent in his choice of materials. How the intermingling dynamics of public and private space—macro and micro—are experienced, digested and take on new forms in cognitive space are of importance to Lindsay, who looks to painting as a way of translating these experiences. Read more

Satellite Exhibition Space @ 131 Queen Street

Group Exhibition 16 Nov 2022 - 20 May 2023 Offsite Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to welcome you to our temporary satellite exhibition space situated at 131 Queen Street, Auckland Central. Read more

Hyper-Abandonment

André Hemer 9 Nov - 3 Dec 2022 Auckland City André Hemer’s paintings work with both physical and digital forms, shifting and combining modes of materiality. Using elements from the natural world as a point of departure, his work culminates in an abstracted form of contemporary landscape. Hemer has a unique way of capturing time and place through using both conventional photography and an en-plein-air flatbed scanner. Read more

Group Exhibition

9 Nov - 3 Dec 2022 Auckland City This exhibition celebrates the monochromatic with works by Shane Cotton, Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon, Richard Killeen and Gordon Walters. Read more

Vacant Possession

Dick Frizzell 19 Oct - 5 Nov 2022 Auckland City Dick Frizzell is a perpetual student, always revisiting and re-evaluating art history. The origins of his recent exhibition can be traced back to his university days when he travelled to Europe on sabbatical in the early 1990s. Having previously relied on images in books he delighted in seeing works in the flesh. As he toured galleries and museums, he collected postcards as mementoes of the masterpieces he had admired. Read more

Fragile Construction

Gregor Kregar 21 Sep - 15 Oct 2022 Auckland City Gregor Kregar’s diverse and expansive career has received attention and critical acclaim for over two decades. Curator Rhana Devenport describes Kregar’s artwork as ‘invitational, spatially alert and socially complex.’ Always generous to the viewer, Kregar’s installations are materially rich, displaying his mastery in different media. 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. This body of work continues Kregar’s long-standing interest in transforming mundane and aesthetically invisible objects into the focus of our attention. Read more

Revere

Group Exhibition 21 Sep - 15 Oct 2022 This exhibition brings together a collection of works by this country's most distinguished artists. Read more

The Open Road

Max Gimblett 24 Aug - 17 Sep 2022 Max Gimblett is a national taonga. Having moved to New York in 1972 as a young adult, he has maintained strong ties with his homeland while building a life for himself in the USA. In normal times he would spend around a month of every year in Aotearoa, visiting more than 55 times since 1959. His last visit was in 2019. Read more

Tiki & Maunga: New Painting

Shane Cotton 27 Jul - 20 Aug 2022 Tiki & Maunga: New Painting focuses on a small survey of Shane Cotton's recent practice, bringing together paintings and sculptural forms. It will also mark the launch of a new suite of six limited edition screenprints. Read more

Asking For A Dream

Grace Wright 6 - 23 Jul 2022 Grace Wright’s paintings emit energy. They invite the viewer into a space tangled with coiled brush strokes that tighten and release. Space expands and contracts, in what could be viewed as expansive, post-apocalyptic worlds, or minute, interior landscapes. Wright cites influences on her thinking as diverse as 17th century religious paintings, and the tempestuous rhythms of the natural world. In her latest body of work, Asking For A Dream, Wright draws more closely upon the concept of a garden, and the relationship she sees between the cultivation of a garden and the act of painting. Read more

In Contemplation

Barry Flanagan 8 Jun - 2 Jul 2022 Barry Flanagan (U.K 1941-2009) is widely recognized as one of Britain’s preeminent sculptors, known for his distinctive use of the hare and other animals. Flanagan’s practice is deeply rooted in the theory of Pataphysics, a conceptual principle which prompted the Dadaist and Surrealist movements—a fascination he shared with Pablo Picasso.... Read more

So No One Will See Me Walk to Deny Me Grace

Virginia Leonard 8 Jun - 2 Jul 2022 Virginia Leonard’s works are an extension of her body, with her movements and her thoughts embedded within their surfaces. Her forms, often large, intricate and ungainly, suggest a highly active, if not exhausting, physical process of making. In these laborious, decadent creations, Leonard adds, subtracts, caresses, and pummels clay before adding deliciously viscous resins and precious metal lustres. The resulting sculptures express a present-moment awareness, stemming from the artist’s actions and how she feels on any given day. Read more

A Following Cadence

James Cousins 11 May - 2 Jun 2022 James Cousins' work is known for combining found lens-based depictions of nature with elements drawn from genealogies of abstract painting. His 2020 exhibition, Song Chain, significantly stripped away the densely packed layers prominent in earlier works. In these pared-back works, Cousins' spray-painted rhythmic bands were given space to oscillate and perform.
A Following Cadence similarly sees the use of banded grounds, but with an additional layer of oil paint in a re-purposing of a wave motif into patterned overlays. Read more

Sculpture for Strange Times

Paul Dibble 11 May - 2 Jun 2022 Paul Dibble's Sculpture for Strange Times Read more

In the Dark the Drunken Ghosts of Masturbations Past

Dale Frank 7 Apr - 4 May 2022 Gow Langsford Gallery presents a dramatic new offering from internationally acclaimed Australian artist Dale Frank (b. 1959). The gallery walls have been painted black, reimagined as a dark space, inviting an unfamiliar perspective for viewing this new vibrant collection of paintings.

Within his practice, Frank consistently subverts the medium of painting through embracing its materiality in newfound ways. His approach ignores the use of a paintbrush and traditional paints, rather embracing hand-pigmented resins that are smoothly poured and scraped upon a background of Perspex. In this new body of work Frank pushes his traditional techniques to create huge depths within these surfaces, often extending to sculptural forms on the surface of the work. These paintings are created through an interplay of deliberate action and chance, as the liquid resin takes on a life of its own, before settling into its final resting place.

There is a sense of movement within these works as though they might continue to shape-shift before our eyes. This is further amplified by the highly reflective surface of the works, which interplays with the changing light of the day and night. Frank has always been interested in how paintings can exist outside of human perception - as a unique entity, living out its days irrespective of those who gaze upon it. They don’t necessarily require context to be understood, rather being their own personality. Read more

Geoff Thornley

From the collection of Dame Jenny Gibbs 16 - 30 Mar 2022 Auckland City Thornley (b.1942) is a protagonist in pure abstraction in this country, having worked within the genre for over four decades. This exhibition showcases a significant time within the artist’s oeuvre, from the beginning of his geometric, mixed-media practice in 1972, through to the Constructions era from the late 1970s to 1990. As the name suggests, the Constructions period showed the artist honing his use of form and colour. In 1974 his mixed media on paper series, Albus, began an exploration of an increasingly simplified composition, allowing a newfound focus on materiality and surface quality. The resulting works had a quality of light and space that hadn’t been seen before in his work, and one that exists within his work today. Read more

Group Exhibition

23 Feb - 12 Mar 2022 Auckland City This group exhibition highlights a range of conceptual practices and a diversity of medium within our stable of artists and we are pleased to be offering new works by many of our artists including among others, Grace Wright, André Hemer, John Pule, Max Gimblett, Virginia Leonard, Paul Dibble, Chris Heaphy and Dick Frizzell. Read more

Bosco Sodi

23 Feb - 12 Mar 2022 Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present a new collection of paintings by contemporary Central American artist Bosco Sodi (b. 1970, Mexico City). Sodi is known primarily for his vibrantly saturated, deeply textured relief paintings and conceptual sculptures and this is the first time his works have been shown in New Zealand. Read more

Moment of Tangency

Matthew Browne 2 - 19 Feb 2022 Painter Matthew Browne’s Moment of Tangency mines the artist’s longstanding interest in automatic drawing. Automatism engages processes designed to release conscious control over an artwork – such as incorporating chance – to render the unconscious mind visible. While automatism is most commonly associated with Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and biomorphic abstraction, Browne deploys it in pursuit of new forms of hard-edged geometric painting. In Browne’s process, a painting evolves in an unplanned and improvised manner, as each new component – a coloured shape, line or layer – intuitively responds to the former. Read more

Dame Louise Henderson

2 - 19 Feb 2022 Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition of works by the late Dame Louise Henderson (1902-1994). Henderson was a pioneer of abstraction in New Zealand and one of few female career painters of her generation. Her prodigious and influential career left a remarkable body of work now held in all major public collections in Aotearoa. Read more

Annual Catalogue 2021-22

Group Exhibition 6 Dec 2021 - 26 Jan 2022 Auckland City Our Annual Catalogue exhibition will run until the end of January 2022 and features works from Jude Rae, Richard Killeen, Pablo Picasso, Pat Hanly, Jacqueline Fahey, Bill Hammond, Tony Cragg, Katharina Grosse, Ralph Hotere, Bernar Venet, John Pule, Judy Millar, Anish Kapoor, Colin McCahon, Frances Hodgkins, Tony Fomison, Barry Flanagan, Allen Maddox, Max Gimblett, Paul Dibble, Dick Frizzell and Michael Smither. Read more

Large Works 2021

Laurence Aberhart 15 Nov - 1 Dec 2021 One of New Zealand’s seminal photographers, Laurence Aberhart, is a self-taught photographer with a notable style; his work seemingly transcends time. Now in his seventies Aberhart continues to resist the digital age and produces contemporary photographs captured through an analogue historical lens, skillfully utilising an antique Korona View Camera. The results are black and white photographs that balance compositional precision with intense atmosphere. Read more

Timestamp

Sara Hughes 15 Nov - 4 Dec 2021 I am fascinated by the measuring of time and light, the way our day is structured by the sun and our orbit, how light changes during this rotation from day to night and all the variants in between. With periods of lockdowns and restrictions over the past 18 months I... Read more

Gone But Not Forgotten

Paul Dibble 12 Nov - 1 Dec 2021 In these times, which are like no other, Paul Dibble in his Palmerston North studio has continued his artistic practice, focusing inwards to develop works themed on the beloved lost Huia, a subject that has occupied him for nearly a decade. Read more

Amen Break

Reuben Paterson 20 Oct - 13 Nov 2021 Reuben Paterson’s largest work to date Guide Kaiārahi was installed on the forecourt of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in July 2021. The 10-metre tall waka pītau carved in bright clear Perspex, fitted with nearly 600 crystals, comes to life at night when it refracts light and casts an... Read more

Clouds and Fire and Water and Air

Judy Millar 4 - 28 Aug 2021 “The works for this exhibition were, for the most part, painted during the year 2020. A period that will be forever bracketed in our hearts and minds as the year of the pandemic. A time when the world went eerily quiet. A time when we were forced to find new relationships with our immediate surroundings.

I spent the year in my isolated home and studio on Auckland’s West Coast. Time slowed. My own focus was on the simplest of things. The movement of clouds. Making fire to stay warm. The light on the water outside my window. Wind and air.

Painting for me is always an attempt to grasp hold of something. As I took the colours of fire, mixed paint to the fluidity of water, produced clouds of coloured spray and attempted to aerate the surface of the canvas into an open space; the solidity of things moved in and out of focus. Forms emerged on the canvas but had a fleeting feeling, as if they were about to dissipate or perhaps hadn’t yet fully formed. Red moved to pink and then back to red. Everything seemed to be in motion. The resulting paintings together form a group where movements continue from one to another, read in this way they become a form of moving landscape. Individually they are snapshots of a particular time and place.”

- Artist Statement, Judy Millar, 2021 Read more

Ralph Hotere

14 - 31 Jul 2021 Read more

The Dark and The Light

John Walsh 14 - 31 Jul 2021 Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Wellington based painter John Walsh. Read more

Sam Harrison

16 Jun - 10 Jul 2021 Auckland City The practice of Christchurch-based artist Sam Harrison explores the universal via the human figure across a range of media - sculpture, woodblock printing, and watercolour. While each material process provides a different insight into the tradition of nude representation, each also feeds into the same conversation: after millennia of depicting the same subject, what does the nude mean for art and the human experience now? Read more

Fire in Light

Pat Hanly 16 Jun - 10 Jul 2021 Auckland City 1960 was a pivotal year for Pat Hanly (1932 - 2004), with the emigre artist producing what would be his first cohesive series, Fire on Earth. Painted in London, three from the series were featured in a group exhibition at the pioneering Gallery One in London's Soho, a new exhibition... Read more

Still not close enough

John Pule 19 May - 12 Jun 2021 For over thirty years, John Pule's painting has returned, time and again, to Niue, and especially to Liku on the island's east coast, the place of his birth and his family's ancestral lands. His paintings have not offered literal depictions. In earlier works, localities were mapped through a visual idiom... Read more

Leda

Antonio Murado 21 Apr - 15 May 2021 We are pleased to exhibit a new body of works by Spanish born, New York based artist Antonio Murado. In Leda, Murado continues to explore ideas from previous works; alternating between both abstract and landscape painting.

In recent years the artist has produced large expansive canvases that are heavily monochromatic in tone. The emphasis is on the medium itself and explores the alchemy of paint and varnish and the effect these have layered upon one another. In this new series, Murado continues this investigation with fields of abstract gestures in soft muted tones, and returns to his more iconic layering of delicate blooms and petals. These flowers are formed not with a brush but by blowing and scraping the oil paint onto the surface. The resulting works have a simplistic and elegant ease with the surface creating unique textures and depth within the varying layers. Read more

Defences Against The Void

Jacqueline Fahey 21 Apr - 15 May 2021 Gow Langsford Gallery is delighted to present the gallery’s first exhibition with Art Foundation Icon Jacqueline Fahey ONZM. Fahey’s paintings collide portraiture with urban and suburban landscapes to create riotously colourful compositions which revel in the chaos of the everyday. Defences Against the Void demonstrates that throughout her lengthy career, Fahey’s subject matter has varied considerably, but her pugnacious approach has not. They are intimate observations of social practices, constructs, and politics, grounded in close consideration of how these issues affect the daily lives of those around her. Read more

This is Life on Earth

Chris Heaphy 17 Mar - 17 Apr 2021 This is Life on Earth is a suite of paintings by artist Chris Heaphy. They construct poignant worlds of familiar and unfamiliar cultural icons and symbols of New Zealand. From his perspective as an artist of Māori descent, Heaphy’s use of iconography unveils the often-unseen dynamics of cultural exchange between Māori and Pākehā upon his canvases. As in previous iterations of Heaphy’s practice, we may instantly recognise the surface meaning of these symbols; however, it is the quiet associations Heaphy makes through paint and the proximity of one symbol to another that as a whole reveals a deeper, more nuanced outcome. Read more

Three Sculptures

Tony Cragg 17 Mar - 16 Apr 2021 This is Tony Cragg's axiom, and the driving force behind the acclaimed British sculptor's practice. His biomorphic sculptures made from glass, steel, bronze, iron and wood blend the organic world around us with the industrial to create new forms of immense and at times alien beauty. In a time when... Read more

Frieze

Group Exhibition 17 Mar - 17 Apr 2021 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The exhibition, titled Frieze, is the third iteration of a show that takes inspiration from the classical frieze tradition where a long stretch of painting, sculpture or calligraphy wraps a wall or architrave. Previous iterations spanned the interior of the Kitchener Street Gallery with paintings in 2005, and Lorne Street in 2011. Here in its third iteration, with works made specifically for the space, the exhibition celebrates this moment in time in contemporary art and pays homage to the site that has hosted numerous artists' projects in the past. Read more

Threshold

Group Exhibition 17 Feb - 13 Mar 2021 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present Threshold featuring new work by our represented artists. Embracing the diversity of our artists’ practices, this exhibition talks to the idea of new beginnings, welcoming change and fresh thinking as we move beyond 2020. Showcasing the work of artists such as James Cousins, Michael Hight, Max Gimblett, Dick Frizzell, Hugo Koha Lindsay, Gregor Kregor, Sara Hughes, Judy Millar, Virginia Leonard Simon Ingram, and Paul Dibble, Threshold gives insight into a broad range of artistic investigations, and is a sample of things to come. Read more

The Path of Light

Max Gimblett 17 Feb - 13 Mar 2021 In The Path of Light, esteemed contemporary painter and calligrapher Max Gimblett’s vibrant energy plays out across the surface of his canvases. Punctuations of gilding in precious metals, for which the artist is well-known, are suggestive of alchemy and both western and non-western religious beliefs. The use of gold, in particular, has a long history which dates back to Egyptian tomb reliefs and paintings. More recently, it has associations with honour, consciousness and enlightenment, which Gimblett draws upon, embracing its significance across cultures. Read more

Waituhi

Group Exhibition 18 Jan - 13 Feb 2021 Auckland City To coincide with the monumental Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art currently on at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi ō Tamaki, Waituhi showcases the work of Māori practitioners practitioners spanning 55 years from 1965 to 2020. Engaging with common concerns of identity and place, the works of Shane Cotton (Ngāpuhi), Darryn George (Ngāpuhi), Chris Heaphy (Ngāi Tahu), Ralph Hotere (Te Aupōuri, Te Rarawa), Reuben Paterson (Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāi Tūhoe, Tūhourangi), John Walsh (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti) and others add to the timely conversation around contemporary Māori art. Each distinct in character, the selection of works speak to individual and collective concerns, celebrating strength of expression grounded in a Māori world view. Read more

Dale Frank

18 Jan - 13 Feb 2021 Recent works by Australian artist Dale Frank. Read more

The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads

André Hemer 25 Nov - 19 Dec 2020 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery presents a new body of work by Vienna-based New Zealand artist André Hemer, where the digital morphs with the material to record the outside world. Featuring abstracted surfaces in the brilliant colours of the ever-changing skies, The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads acts as an ode to circadian rhythm at a time where the world is in paradox – pandemic related restrictions have caused us to be more observant of nature’s fleeting moments while being disconnected with the natural environment in an unprecedented way. Read more

Karl Maughan

25 Nov - 19 Dec 2020 Karl Maughan’s new exhibition at our Kitchener St Gallery presents a suite of works that are accented with sunflowers, harking back to the flora featured in the artist’s early period. Read more

Two Rivers

Michael Hight 28 Oct - 21 Nov 2020 Michael Hight’s latest exhibition Two Rivers makes particular reference to the Whanganui and Rangitikei Rivers, sites of personal significance to the artist’s whakapapa and upbringing. The exhibition brings together two distinct compositional approaches, which share common meditations on the Anthropocene’s manipulation of the natural landscape. Read more

Night Journal

Graham Fletcher 28 Oct - 21 Nov 2020 The Night Journal paintings develop upon Fletcher’s long-standing investigation of material cultures and intercultural spaces. As an extension to these ideas Fletcher has reintroduced pattern and decoration in response to a recent BBC documentary on Paul Gauguin’s life and artistic output entitled, Gauguin: A Dangerous Life (2019). This documentary featured the highly decorative works from Fletcher’s Virgin series (2001) alongside works of other artists such as Kehinde Wiley in its investigation of artistic responses to the works of Gauguin. Through the genre of still life painting, Fletcher has examined pictorial motifs that have come to represent Polynesia, including images of lush tropical vegetation and flowers as well as other patterns of consumption and domestic taste such as wallpaper placed alongside tribal objects and artefacts. This year Fletcher was awarded the Tylee Cottage Residency and Lilian Ida Smith Award which he will undertake in 2021 in Whanganui. Read more

Ceci N'est Pas 1921

Dick Frizzell 28 Oct - 21 Nov 2020 An exhibition of works from Dick Frizzell. Read more

A River Flowing Out of Eden

Darryn George 30 Sep - 22 Oct 2020 Taking its title from the Book of Genesis, Darryn George’s A River Flowing out of Eden marks a notable shift in the artist’s career. Where previous abstract works utilised a limited palette of blue, red, black and white, brought together in minimalist compositions, George’s latest paintings are playfully polychromatic and combine abstracted shapes with foliage and flowers to create dreamlike gardens of delight. Read more

Exalt in Transmission

David McCracken 30 Sep - 22 Oct 2020 'These works are derived from my experiences as a young working man in marginal rural New Zealand and in other, usually male-dominated working environments. I noticed how working men found and expressed respect for their fellow man through appreciation of their craft and skill, as represented by the objects and... Read more

Brother's Keeper

Lisa Roet 30 Sep - 22 Oct 2020 Thomas Huxley’s nineteenth century view that "nature is nasty and indifferent, and mortality is the sword forged by man to slay the dragon of its animal past" has evolved into that of an age of empathy in the twenty-first century. An artist’s role is to tease the imagination, and hint at possibilities, while science demonstrates through repeated observations and solid data. Through Roet’s own limited research into animal behaviour, she has attempted to follow the path of the scientist through the eye of the artist and produce a series of moments of observation to support the idea that we are living in "the age of empathy". Read more

Alpha Paradise

Grace Wright 9 - 26 Sep 2020 First solo exhibition of works by Grace Wright. Read more

GAN Painting

Simon Ingram 9 - 26 Sep 2020 In Simon Ingram's GAN Painting, we see the artist working in a new way with images of the ‘machine dreams’ of an artificial intelligence algorithm able to ‘grow’ synthetic images from a large library of ‘real-world’ images. These images are then interpreted by Ingram’s machine as a series of brush strokes and painted over the course of many days and nights in his Auckland studio. The distillation of these compositions as an array of polychromatic brush strokes extends work in 2019 made using a monochrome palette of mixed blacks. But if GAN Painting represents a departure for the artist, it’s not just through the use of colour. Much of his work has interpreted energy from different ‘natural’ sources as painting. For instance, Radio Painting Station - Looking for the Waterhole at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (DE), captured cosmic energy as painting, while Monadic Device, Sydney Contemporary (AU), captured the electrical activity of the brain as painting. But in GAN Painting, the presence of each composition’s synthetically grown image is available to the viewer in a different way - not as an ‘abstract graph’ of cosmic or cognitive energy, but as a representational image held just beyond range, in order to generate an ambiguous matrix of brush marks neither real or unreal. Read more

Divided We Fall

Gregor Kregar 9 - 26 Sep 2020 I came to New Zealand 23 years ago and I experienced many barriers that emigrants face, from language barriers to the awareness of being other. There is a period of time early on where you are just surviving in a world far away from your family and friends before you... Read more

2 in 1: Judy Millar and Alberto Garcia-Alvarez

5 Aug - 5 Sep 2020 This exhibition featuring the work of Alberto Garcia-Alvarez and Judy Millar has been curated by Stephen Bambury. It is exciting to be able to bring the three together in a public dialogue for the first time.

The exhibition will focus on two distinct periods of Garcia-Alvarez’ and Millar’s work. Paintings produced by Garcia-Alvarez during his time in California in the late 1960s have been selected by Bambury to sit alongside paintings painted during the last few years in his Auckland studio. Millar will exhibit work from 1981 when she was a student at Elam together with a number of recent paintings. Read more

Tony Fomison

8 - 28 Jul 2020 This exhibition of works presents the diversity in Tony Fomison’s painting practice through a selection of key works covering a time span of almost thirty years. Recognised as one of New Zealand’s most notable painters, his works were influenced by the European master paintings he saw in Europe following his... Read more

Song Chain

James Cousins 8 Jul - 1 Aug 2020 In Song Chain we see a departure from the complex layering and botanical references of works presented in Necessary Distraction at the Auckland Art Gallery (2015) and Restless Idiom at Te Uru (2015). As if in a loosened up rewinding and concentration of process, the artist stays with his most rhythmic set of gestures. Cousins’ characteristic rhythmic bands, a key element in the particular kind of pictorial space he is known for, are given space here to perform in their own right. Loosely figural elements oscillate in parallel with the verticality of the body. Colour evokes identification with soot and spore, of cloud captured in a liquid rhythmic wave. Airborne particles are caught and absorbed as colour then re made by the particulate effect of the spray gun in a lapsed agglomeration of run-offs in a post-industrial chemical version of Renaissance-like Sfumato (smoky line). Read more

Screenprints

Dale Frank 8 Jul - 1 Aug 2020 For the first time in almost thirty years, Dale Frank presents a series of unique screenprints on paper.

Working at an Auckland based studio earlier this year Frank pushed the limits of the technique, working directly onto the screens much like he would with his original works to create large format works on paper.

Contrasting the traditional fast pace of screen printing, his approach is time consuming and the resulting body of works are, unlike traditional editions, each unique. The process allowed Frank the freedom to produce a series of works that relate strongly to his painting practice, whilst also embracing several aesthetic elements that could only be achieved by screen printing.

These works are available exclusively through Gow Langsford Gallery. Read more

Breath Holder

Virginia Leonard 10 Jun - 4 Jul 2020 As poems constructed from her clay language, Leonard’s ceramics delight in the viscera of her body. The large structures recall the quotidian shapes of vases, jugs, and urns, but are abstracted, morphed into melting masses of sticky resin and bulging lumps. By creating vessels we associate with the domestic, Leonard reminds us that for her chronic pain is ongoing – part of her unique every day. As pneumatic objects that contain air in their hollow bodies, and topped, urn-like, with lids, Leonard’s ceramics are themselves breath holders: gleaming reliquaries of her spirit. Read more

Four Sculptures

Paul Dibble 13 May - 2 Jul 2020 Four monumental sculptures act as guides through Paul Dibble’s upcoming exhibition, ushering us through over 35 years of the sculptor’s oeuvre. During this time the artist has taken his practice in four distinct directions, but crucially, these are concurrent. Rather than leave behind a thread having exhausted its potential, Dibble returns to bodies of work and their distinctive techniques and influences, finding them to be sites for infinite development and exploration. Each of the exhibition’s quartet of large-scale bronzes, made in the artist’s Palmerston North foundry, represents one of these movements to survey Dibble’s command of the metal and its innate versatility as an artistic medium. Read more

ABHK20

Group Exhibition 11 Mar - 4 Apr 2020 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Earlier in the year Art Basel Hong Kong was cancelled amid fears of the spread of the coronavirus. Having worked on the presentation for many months it has been reconceptualised and a version will be shown at our Lorne St Gallery for two weeks before we close to prepare for Bernar Venet's performance on 25 March.

Selected for the Kabinett sector our planned presentation for Hong Kong included a designated focus on prominent painter Judy Millar. Together with her solo presentation of recent works, was a group of works by Oceanic artists including Colin McCahon (NZ, 1919-1987), Dale Frank (AU, b. 1959), John Pule (Niue, b.1962) and Lisa Roet (AU, b. 1967). While Millar's body of work will be shown at another date this exhibition is based around works that would have otherwise been shown at Art Basel Hong Kong this month. Read more

Electric Thought Patterns

Allen Maddox 11 Mar - 4 Apr 2020 The works of Allen Maddox have an undeniable cohesion through the use of the cross motif; a symbol that became synonymous with his practice. Electric Thought Patterns, an exhibition of previously unseen works, displays how Maddox was able to use the seemingly restrictive formal vocabulary of the cross and grid and meld two affinities of formalist expressionism: one, the controlled, often aggressive gesture (straight, intersecting lines); the other, a free and organic movement of paint. The works exhibited are a cross-section of his career from the 1970s to the late 1990s; each work rich with colour, texture and emotion. Read more

Detours

Group Exhibition 11 Mar - 4 Apr 2020 Auckland City The narrative of abstraction in western painting is one of linear progression. We are taught that abstraction unfolded neatly: from Braque’s pixelated landscapes via Kandinsky’s colour explosions to Mondrian’s grids, we arrived at abstraction proper. But if total abstraction was achieved with Malevich’s Black Square in 1915, how then does painting continue along this linear trajectory more than 100 years later? For three Berlin-based contemporary artists Katharina Grosse, Bernard Frize, and Imi Knoebel, the answer lies in subverting progress itself. Detours brings together works by these artists to present an argument for divergent timelines. Read more

Prelude: 2020

Group Exhibition 12 Feb - 7 Mar 2020 Auckland City For the first time, Gow Langsford Gallery presents an exhibition of works by new graduates. Selected from three Auckland Art Schools, Prelude : 2020 provides an opportunity to see works by some exceptional emerging artists, offering insight into current thinking in contemporary visual arts at a grassroots level.

The practices of the invited artists offer diverse viewpoints through a range of media and conceptual concerns. The artists presenting are: Andrea Bolima (b.1991, Philippines/New Zealand, AUT), Eleanor Cooper (b. 1988, New Zealand, ELAM), Melanie Hall (ELAM), Rohan Hardy (b. 1993, UK, Whitecliffe), Peng Jiheng (b. 1994, China, ELAM), Vivian Jin (b. 1991, South Korea, ELAM), Chantel Matthews (b. 1978, New Zealand, Tainui, AUT), Shawnee Tekii (b. 1998, New Zealand, Cook Islands, Whitecliffe), Grace Wright (b. 1992, New Zealand, ELAM). Read more

Through The Window

Group Exhibition 12 Feb - 7 Mar 2020 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Through The Window explores the various ways in which our natural world is portrayed in art. Featuring works by New Zealand painters, Dick Frizzell, Karl Maughan, Michael Hight and Graham Fletcher; Spanish born painter Antonio Murado, and Belgium painter Jan de Vliegher. Read more

Dale Frank

27 Nov 2019 - 8 Feb 2020 The paintings of celebrated contemporary Australian artist Dale Frank have long mesmerised viewers, their characteristically colourful surfaces at once seductive and sublime. Over a successful international career spanning four decades, Frank has continuously experimented with the conceptual and formal properties of paint, asking first: how does paint move? And then: how does painting move us? Mounted across both gallery spaces, Gow Langsford Gallery presents a new body of work painted on mirrored Perspex, emphasising the physical experience of his paintings. Read more

Athenree

Karl Maughan 30 Oct - 23 Nov 2019 Karl Maughan has dedicated his career to creating his characteristic horticultural paintings. Over an extraordinary career spanning more than 30 years, Maughan has found endless inspiration in gardens, which for him bridge dreams and nature. Gow Langsford Gallery presents a new exhibition by the widely recognised and highly sought after artist, entitled Athenree, a body of work which celebrates the Spring landscape in all its floral glory. Read more

Many Worlds

Max Gimblett 30 Oct - 23 Nov 2019 When one considers contemporary abstraction in New Zealand, Max Gimblett is an artist who has been at the forefront of this movement for decades. Having lived in New York since 1972, New Zealand born Gimblett uses his dual citizenship to his advantage with regular visits back to his home country that he greatly adores. The results are works that are filled with the vibrancy and immediacy that comes with living in New York, and an innate ease from his Kiwi roots. Max’s Zen Buddhism philosophies impact greatly on his practice, represented not only physically through gesture and movement whilst creating the works, but also on a deeper spiritual level. Read more

of common walls

Hugo Koha Lindsay 2 - 24 Oct 2019 A two-fold question frames Hugo Koha Lindsay’s most recent body of work: what is a landscape? And what can it be within the language of abstraction? Lindsay poses this question in the context of the environment of late capitalism; a landscape of sorts that is both the physical land and buildings, and the socio-economic atmosphere. He submits his paintings as “alternative cartographies”, maps that don’t simply describe geographical landmass, but which ask: what is the physical and psychological experience of being in this space? Lindsay’s paintings featured in of common walls are the direct residue of such musings. Read more

The Intimates

Reuben Paterson 4 - 28 Sep 2019 E whiti e te ra, e Maene ki te Kiri - the title of a painting of clouds by celebrated artist Reuben Paterson takes its title from the first two lines of a Maori waiata or folk song meaning: "Shine, the sun soft on skin." It is this same lyrical warmth we can expect from the artist's most recent body of work. The Intimateswill feature three sculptures which act as overgrown mobiles to mesmerise and delight the inner child. These will stand alongside intricately glittered botanical and cloudscape paintings which are imbued with intimacy, celebrating love, loss, and personal growth. Paterson, taking inspiration from the Canadian poet Anne Michaels, has commissioned a piece of writing from friend and art essayist Dina Jezdic to accompany the exhibition. Read more

Everywhere in the World

John Pule 4 - 28 Sep 2019 Everywhere in the World provides an intimate viewing into John Pule’s life and the influence that the Pacific, particularly his birthplace of Niue, has had on his practice. These new works evoke a sense of place, memories of a time gone by and a different pace of life than what most of us are accustomed to. In his artist statement, Pule’s poetic narrative helps to navigate us, the viewer, to this other land surrounded by the ocean and lush greenery of the forest that envelopes those who inhabit it. Read more

Spring Catalogue 2019

Group Exhibition 7 - 31 Aug 2019 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Spring Catalogue exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery has been a tradition for over 25 years, showcasing significant works of art by established New Zealand and international artists. This year, the exhibition will run across both the Lorne Street and newly renovated Kitchener Street Gallery spaces, and will include work by artists Gordon Walters, Lois White, Colin McCahon, Patrick Hanly, Karl Maughan and others. Read more

Pleiades: Seven Sisters of New Zealand Painting

Group Exhibition 17 Jul - 3 Aug 2019 Auckland City Pleiades: Seven Sisters of New Zealand Painting charts female painters through 100 years of painting in Aotearoa. Featuring a selection of works from canonical artists Frances Hodgkins, Rita Angus, Louise Henderson, and Doris Lusk alongside contemporary artist Sara Hughes and emerging painters Ruth Ige and Vivienne Worn, Pleiades considers the communicative qualities of painting, and celebrates a constellation of artists whose practices embrace and evolve the complexities of the medium. Read more

Across the Earth: 100 Years of Colin McCahon

10 Jul - 3 Aug 2019 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] To mark the centenary of Colin McCahon’s birth, Gow Langsford Gallery celebrates the preeminent New Zealand modernist with an exhibition of his paintings on loose canvas. Across the Earth: 100 years of Colin McCahon unites a collection of significant paintings that exemplify the artist’s distinctive treatment of the New Zealand landscape, and demonstrates the austere spiritualism endemic to his practice. Focussing on loose canvases of McCahon’s Muriwai period, the exhibition explores the immediacy of raw materials in the works of the giant of New Zealand painting. Read more

Enveloping Scales

Group Exhibition 12 Jun - 6 Jul 2019 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] An oversized painting will frequently dominate the room in which it hangs, engulfing the viewer physically and, often, emotionally. Gow Langsford Gallery presents Enveloping Scales, an exhibition of five paintings that consider the act of looking when viewing large format works. Each work typical of their maker’s practice, Reuben Paterson’s Whakapapa Get Down on Your Knees, John Pule’s Not of this Time (Dreamland), John Reynold’s Liberty During Construction, Judy Millar’s Ring in the View and Jeffrey Harris’ Of Time and Ambience all evince the affective qualities afforded by large scale painting. Read more

8 Minutes and 17 Seconds

Sara Hughes 15 May - 8 Jun 2019 These new paintings have developed out of an intense three year period working on my largest public art project to date for the New Zealand International Convention Centre. A work on 550 glass panels that covers 2400 sq m. Thinking of what it means to be from this land and of this place challenged my thinking and pushed me into new territory. It made me delve back into my past, to remember my childhood growing up in the far north of New Zealand. It was the overwhelming sense of light and colour that was imprinted on my memory. I have clear recollections of the enormity of the bush when I was young and collecting as many types of green leaves and foliage as I could. I would try to catalogue them but when I came back the next day they had faded and changed so I would start again. - Sara Hughes Read more

Large Format

Laurence Aberhart 15 May - 8 Jun 2019 Laurence Aberhart works are understated yet powerful, captured using a 100-year-old Korona View Camera; the sort that pioneers used in the nineteenth century to bring home records of what the world looked like. Aberhart develops each image using an entirely analog process where each is developed by hand, usually keeping to the same scale as the camera's negative allows. For the first time, this new body of photographs are all printed at a larger scale and have been specially printed in Belgium to maintain the intensity of detail and atmosphere that he captures in each image. Read more

A World Not of Things

Judy Millar 17 Apr - 11 May 2019 Gow Langsford Gallery presents A World Not Of Things, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Judy Millar. Read more

New Works

Group Exhibition 17 Apr - 11 May 2019 Auckland City Our latest group exhibition will feature new works fresh from our artists' studios, including works by Max Gimblett, Toby Raine, Judy Millar, James Cousins, Reuben Paterson, Michael Hight, Sara Hughes, Hugo Koha Lindsay, Graham Fletcher, Martin Ball, Gregor Kregar, Lisa Roet and David McCracken. The exhibition will also coincide with the Auckland Art Fair (1 - 5 May 2019) where we will be exhibiting new works by Karl Maughan, Paul Dibble and Max Gimblett. Read more

Arcs and Angles

Bernar Venet 20 Mar - 13 Apr 2019 Widely regarded as one of France's greatest living artists, Bernar Venet has a resume that spans more than decades and includes exhibitions and accolades from all around the world. Highlights include solo exhibitions at prestigious French locations such as the Palace of Versailles, and the Arc de Triomphe. Locally, one of his tallest sculptures soars to almost 27 metres at Gibbs Farm, just north of Auckland. Gow Langsford Gallery is proud to present Arcs and Angles, a solo exhibition of works from two formative series, marking his first solo exhibition with Gow Langsford since 2012. Read more

Mercurial

John Walsh 20 Mar - 13 Apr 2019 Mercurial, the title of John Walsh’s new exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery, is to be in a continuous state of change and evolution. Deriving from the Latin mercuriālis, it is also associated with the Roman God Mercury, the messenger, who serves as the guide to the underworld and is, perhaps, related to Manaia and Marakihau the messengers of our Ao Maori (Maori world view). The ethereal ecosystems of Walsh’s paintings might also be mercurial in nature, traversing a fluid truth between myth and reality where figures emerge from familiar yet uncertain landscapes with beings and creatures constantly morphing. Walsh’s mixed Aitanga-a-Hauiti and New Zealand Irish ancestry has long informed his practice, frequently combining Maori oral histories and cosmology with their European counterparts to express the constant negotiation between cultures and their environment. Read more

Bloom

Chris Heaphy 20 Feb - 16 Mar 2019 Chris Heaphy’s new exhibition Bloom explores the relationship between painting and the natural world. Images appear familiar, yet somehow unfamiliar in their relationship to us the viewer and to one another. Plants or trees are placed in vases or appear to grow from silhouettes of Maori portraits or heads, images which themselves are derived from historical portraits; mostly painted by European artists depicting Maori in a contrived style to suit an audience far from New Zealand. Perhaps it is Heaphy’s intent to claim them back and reinstate them into a cultural context from which they were taken. Read more

Almost Blue

Group Exhibition 20 Feb - 16 Mar 2019 Auckland City Associated with the sea and sky that surround us, the colour blue has seduced artists and their audiences for millennia. Unlike red or yellow ochre, the blue we see day to day cannot be turned into a pigment - instead artists have turned to rare and precious sources to create the colour. The captivating colour has seen artists from Raphael to Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky to Yves Klein dedicate periods of their practices to studies in blue. This summer, Gow Langsford Gallery applies a blue filter to present Almost Blue, an exhibition which brings together works by international heavy hitter Anish Kapoor alongside prominent Australasian artists including Dale Frank and Max Gimblett. Read more

Summer Group Exhibition

14 Jan - 16 Feb 2019 Auckland City Our summer exhibition features a selection of works from prominent contemporary New Zealand artists; Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon, Shane Cotton, Graham Fletcher, Chris Heaphy and John Pule. Read more

Lolly Scramble

Group Exhibition 14 Jan - 16 Feb 2019 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Lolly Scramble is an eclectic mix of recent works by Australasian Gallery artists. The brightly coloured mix takes its title from the children’s party game and Dick Frizzell’s 2018 painting Lots of Lollies. Read more

Day Paintings

André Hemer 28 Nov - 22 Dec 2018 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In Day Paintings, André Hemer explores the relationship between digital media and painting, between materiality and form. In dusky tones and silky hues of peach, Hemer builds layered surfaces combining scanning techniques with printed and painted gestures. In this series, painted objects were scanned outdoors, picking up a sense of the atmospheric conditions in which they were captured. Read more

Hikoi

Darryn George 31 Oct - 24 Nov 2018 Christchurch based artist Darryn George’s new exhibition Hikoi approaches history painting from a contemporary, New Zealand perspective.

The namesake of the exhibition and the main focus is the seven-paneled work Hikoi (2018). At over seven meters in length, this work is an abstract representation of an aerial view over the Red Sea as the waters are being blown back. Combining gestural abstraction with the intricate patterning of kōwhaiwhai, George overlays Māori text onto plumes of painted canvas to depict the journey of Israel from slavery through the Red Sea to the Promised Land; a journey from darkness to light. Read more

Master of Line

Henri Matisse 31 Oct - 24 Nov 2018 Henri Matisse (France, 1869 – 1954) was a pioneering figure in Modern art, and is recognised as one of the most influential artists of the era. Renowned worldwide for his extraordinary ability to capture the essence of his subject in just a few powerful lines, Matisse was an accomplished draughtsman, sculptor, and printmaker, moving between various media and techniques with ease. This exclusive exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery presents a curated selection of etchings, lithographs, aquatints, and linocuts spanning a period from as early as 1906 until shortly before his death in 1954. Master of Line marks the first time Matisse’s works will be exhibited in a private gallery in New Zealand. Read more

Landscapes

Dick Frizzell and Karl Maughan 3 - 27 Oct 2018 Considered two of New Zealand’s most prominent living artists, close friends Karl Maughan and Dick Frizzell have joined forces once again. Their sold out 1998 joint exhibition aptly titled Landscapes will be revisited 20 years later as both artists draw on the New Zealand landscape as a mutual point of inspiration. It is what Frizzell calls “The reunion tour …getting the band back together”. Read more

The Poignancy of Absence

Paul Dibble 3 - 27 Oct 2018 Birds have long been associated by humans with the ethereal. Appearing globally in lore as omens and symbols, they act as airborne messengers traversing the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. Flowers too have historically been ascribed a symbolic meaning, regularly employed in art and literature to express a hidden narrative, or gifted as traditional expressions of love and loss. The metaphorical significance of the two might seem tethered to the past – yet our contemporary world abounds with birds and flowers used as emblems for cultures, countries, and companies. But what happens when we lose the icon itself? The Poignancy of Absence, Paul Dibble’s exhibition of new sculptures, considers the impact of extinction on our cultural ecosystem, and presents a eulogy to New Zealand’s own lost fauna. Read more

Monadic Device at Sydney Contemporary 2018

Simon Ingram 13 - 16 Sep 2018 Simon Ingram in collaboration with John-Paul Pochin will present an endurance-based artwork of sorts, Monadic Device, a five-day painting event in which Ingram’s mental activity is recorded as a response to his own drawing and to the environment of Sydney Contemporary. Picked up by an EEG headset and interpreted by custom software, this data is then materialised as a series of paintings by a machine developed by the artist. In undertaking this project the artist brings together elements of his recent work at Germany’s ZKM Centre for Art and Media where invisible cosmic energy was made visible as painting with a new, rekindled interest in subjectivity, people, and politics. Read more

Step Size Zero

James Cousins 5 - 29 Sep 2018 The title for James Cousins' new exhibition refers to the Graphtec cutters setting, step size 0, the optimum level of precision available, which regulates levels of accuracy during the cutting of the long arcs and curves that make the vinyl stencils employed in the making of Cousins’ works. The demands of these large new works pressurise this precision to a point where unregulated incidentals, slips, rumbles, blips and bleeds seep into the complexly patterned orthodoxy of the cut stencils. This ethos of suggestion and retraction is also echoed through the orchestrated patterns of wide bands, derived from a dual tracking of movement of an airbrush across and around the supporting canvas, evident in the underpainting that layer the canvasses. Read more

The Golden Haze

Graham Fletcher 5 - 29 Sep 2018 Graham Fletcher’s Samoan and European genealogy provides a constant interplay of disparities in his overall artistic practice. In this new body of work, Fletcher uses a selection of ethnographic objects collected throughout many of Captain James Cook’s voyages and reimagines these objects within ‘tasteful’ modern interiors in his continuing examination of the complex and dynamic relationship between the civilised and ‘primitive’, colonial and colonised, and the observers and the observed. This exhibition, entitled The Golden Haze, marks the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first landmark expedition to the Pacific. The inspiration for the title came after reading Roderick Cameron’s The Golden Haze: With Captain Cook in the South Pacific (1964) in which the author, between 1959 and 1961, retraced Cook’s voyages in the Pacific journaling his own personal experiences in contrast with those of Cook's. Read more

Dale Frank

8 Aug - 1 Sep 2018 Australian artist Dale Frank is known for his evocative abstract works challenging the concept of painting. Widely recognized as one of Australia’s most successful artists, his works are aligned with some of the most exciting and innovative contemporary painters of today. This solo exhibition of new works at our Lorne St Gallery sees materials such as varnish and aluminium collide in lively surfaces both fluid and deeply textural. Read more

Studies in Place

Judy Millar 8 Aug - 1 Sep 2018 Often working on a large scale, Judy Millar’s latest exhibition Studies in Place provides an intimate viewing of works that are typically unseen outside of her studio; her smaller works on paper. Referenced as ‘studies’, these works showcase Millar’s painterly thought process as she begins to flesh out ideas that may later be conceived on canvas. Unintentionally, these studies become complete works in themselves and have been critical to her practice since 1987, when Millar first moved to the extreme environment that is Auckland’s West Coast. Read more

Who Told You You Were Naked

Leah Emery 11 Jul - 4 Aug 2018 Gow Langsford Gallery is proud to present Australian artist Leah Emery’s first solo exhibition in New Zealand. This exhibition features two bodies of works; It’s Going Swimmingly (2015) and Who Told You You Were Naked (2016-current), both using cross-stitch embroidery to portray the explicit pornographic subject matter. Read more

The Hunterville Suite

Michael Hight 11 Jul - 4 Aug 2018 Michael Hight returns to Gow Langsford Gallery with a solo exhibition of recent works returning to a series commonly referred to as ‘the black paintings’ - a crucial series of Hight’s oeuvre since 2008.

The Hunterville Suite presents six paintings that recall historical notions of the theatre of memory and cabinets of curiosities. Read more

Tony Cragg

9 May - 4 Jul 2018 Tony Cragg is widely recognized as one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation. Having maintained a consistently high international profile since the 1980s his work has contributed significantly to the global discourse around contemporary sculpture. At the center of his practice is an interest in the relationship between materials, science and the body.

This phenomenal new exhibition at our Lorne Street Gallery showcases works from a variety of mediums, including wood, marble, steel and bronze. Each is multi-faceted, exploring possibilities for stimulating multiple perceptions within a single work. Read more

Colin McCahon

7 May - 7 Jul 2018 Following the success of our recent presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong, this exhibition brings together paintings from several of Colin McCahon’s most formative stages and will reflect the significance of a home-grown artist, whose stature in Australasia can only be compared to the influence that artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko had on American art. Spanning two decades of his career - from 1958 to 1977 - the show documents the scope of the artist’s evolving concerns: the relationship between Maori and the New Zealand landscape, as well as the influence of early settlers and their beliefs on this revered land. Read more

A Place to Stand

Group Exhibition 18 Apr - 4 May 2018 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] A Place to Stand is a curated exhibition that considers the complexities of humans’ relationship to the landscape. While not a landscape exhibition in the traditional sense these works are linked by the impact ‘place’ has had on each artist. Read more

But will it float

Hugo Koha Lindsay 21 Mar - 14 Apr 2018 Primarily an abstract painter, Hugo Koha Lindsay adopts marks from both the personal surroundings of his home and studio and from the wider urban environment. Rubbings from the studio floor combine with swift gestures resembling surveyor markings - a type of code applied to pavements to signify future construction. Canvases are un-stretched, cut, sewn and re-stretched, organizing pictorial space through the work’s construction. Sections of Lindsay’s paintings are often left raw, invoking a transitional state. Lindsay states, “The sewn paintings act as topographies -an informational surface of which territories are divided by physical boundaries for the activity of painting to occur.” Read more

Serial Works: Masonic Lodges. Taranaki

Laurence Aberhart 21 Mar - 14 Apr 2018 An Aberhart photograph is one which is instantly recognisable. Laurence Aberhart captures the everyday, our past and our present all through atmospheric black and white photography. Despite the perceived quietness of his imagery, his ability to capture immense depth and detail is all down to the analogue process he employs along with a complex understanding on the effect of light, and an inherent ability to frame an image perfectly. This new exhibition features a selection of photographs with Masonic lodges as the protagonist taken from as far North as Kaitaia, down to Balclutha in Otago alongside photographs of Taranaki taken between 1986 to 2010. Read more

Sunset Moon

Max Gimblett 21 Feb - 17 Mar 2018 At the age of 82, Max Gimblett shows no signs of slowing down. The upcoming solo exhibition across both our Lorne St and Kitchener St Galleries showcases new abstract paintings that are vital and energetic, utilizing a fresh colour palette of pastels, which are contrasted with dark accents and gilded gestures. Read more

Zig-Zag

Karl Maughan 15 Nov - 9 Dec 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Karl Maughan grew up in Palmerston North, before attending Elam School of Fine Arts in 1983. During his years at Art School, Maughan began working with garden scenes as a way of dealing with light, shade and composition. The subject matter suited his explorations with paint, and gardens have been the subject of Maughan’s work for over 30 years. He writes, “I’m interested in all the cultural associations we all have with the idea of the garden. They are a central part of the idea of civilisation, the first instance of humans asserting their control over nature.” Read more

The Here And Now

Chris Heaphy 15 Nov - 9 Dec 2017 Auckland City Chris Heaphy’s new exhibition The Here and Now explores our perception of place and time. The paintings appear to be flat images of coloured flower arrangements, or brightly coloured dots, ordered on a white background. Looking closer, they float between a world of recognizable images and abstract or symbolic meaning. Read more

A Sound of Thunder

Gregor Kregar 18 Oct - 11 Nov 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gregor Kregar, A Sound of Thunder exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery, 2017 Read more

John Walsh

18 Oct - 11 Nov 2017 Auckland City In John Walsh’s recent body of works, we are transported to a realm in which spirits and humans co-exist. Time and space overlap as contemporary beings mix with ethereal suggestions of what might lay beyond. With mixed Aitanga a Hauiti and New Zealand Irish Heritage, Walsh’s ancestors voyaged across oceans on their immense journey to Aotearoa. The navigation of the Pacific was a profound feat, through which Walsh finds inspiration for how we might navigate the future. He writes of the “evolving culture that had to be patient, resourceful, inventive, prepared to drop truths and beliefs… embracing a measured love, fear, respect and exhilaration of venturing into the uncertain.” Read more

Black Matters II

Reuben Paterson 20 Sep - 14 Oct 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The medium of glitter is not one that is easily manipulated, however, New Zealand artist Reuben Paterson has spent the past 20 years developing, refining and mastering his medium. His works are provocative, alluring, and most of all, mesmerising. Black Matters II is a new series of work exploring themes of light and politics, captured in snapshots of brilliant, bursting fireworks. Read more

Works from the Collection of the Late Sir Paul Holmes

20 Sep - 14 Oct 2017 Auckland City The late, great and often controversial Sir Paul Holmes will be remembered for his services to New Zealand journalism, but outside of his illustrious broadcasting career, Holmes, and his wife Lady Deborah Holmes were avid art collectors. They acquired a small but impressive collection of works predominately by New Zealand artists, most of which were housed at Mana Lodge, their private residence in the Hawkes Bay. Gow Langsford Gallery is proud to present a selection of works from this beloved personal collection. Read more

Celebrating 30 Years

Group Exhibition 23 Aug - 16 Sep 2017 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] From humble beginnings in a converted petrol station on Richmond Road, Grey Lynn to two central Auckland locations, John Gow and Gary Langsford have been at the helm of Gow Langsford Gallery since its opening. Their shared passion and dedication to the arts has contributed to their ongoing success locally and internationally.

Gow Langsford Gallery's inaugural exhibition opened on the 9th of August 1987 with a group exhibition that included works by Dick Frizzell, Judy Millar, and Allen Maddox. Thirty years on, Frizzell and Millar are still represented by the gallery, as is the estate of Allen Maddox. It is only fitting to celebrate this milestone with a group exhibition featuring new works from the current Gow Langsford Gallery stable. Read more

Matériel

Jono Rotman 26 Jul - 19 Aug 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] America based, New Zealand born photographer Jono Rotman returns to Gow Langsford Gallery for his third solo exhibition Matériel, following on from his controversial Mongrel Mob Portrait series. Using large format photography, Matériel explores the politically and culturally complex issues of weaponry. Read more

New Works

Antonio Murado 26 Jul - 19 Aug 2017 Auckland City Spanish born painter Antonio Murado continually pushes the boundaries with his painting techniques. While a brush upon canvas may be the preferred method by many, Murado employs the acts of scraping, blowing, peeling and corroding his mediums in order to create his seemingly delicate works. Fresh from his New York studio where he now resides, New Works is an exhibition which showcases his skills as a painter who cannot be categorised within a single genre. His works weave through that of landscape and abstraction; showcasing a fine balance between both, as flower petals float within sweeps of gestural oil paint. Read more

Whitelight

Lisa Roet 28 Jun - 22 Jul 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Australian artist Lisa Roet presents a new body of work completed especially for her third solo exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery. These works are based on her visit to the snow monkeys in the hot springs of Japan in 2016. Read more

New Zealand Light

Group Exhibition 28 Jun - 22 Jul 2017 Auckland City New Zealand Light is a group exhibition which celebrates five of New Zealand's most significant modern artists, Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters, Ralph Hotere, Shane Cotton, and Peter Robinson. The common thread that runs through their respective practices is their masterful ability to convey reflections of light within a largely monochromatic palette. Shadows rise to the surface or fall back between layers of foreground and background, their shifting nature reflecting equally tumultuous periods of political and social upheaval in New Zealand’s cultural history. Read more

Digital Plastique

Simon Ingram 31 May - 24 Jun 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] All of the works in Simon Ingram’s Digital Plastique began as drawings made on an Android phone. These drawings are made by Ingram in-between times, while he is waiting or when gaps open up in a day. Read more

New Northland Explorations, Some Interiors

Laurence Aberhart 31 May - 24 Jun 2017 Auckland City As part of the Auckland Festival of Photography (1 June – 24 June), we are pleased to present a solo exhibition of works from renowned New Zealand photographer, Laurence Aberhart. The emotive and atmospheric use of black and white photography is distinct of Aberhart’s works. They often capture iconic buildings, memorials and cemeteries within quiet and almost eerie settings. Despite their inherent stillness, the photographs are rife with history with Aberhart possessing a unique skill in capturing a moment in time through carefully considered compositions. Read more

Getting to Know You

Richard Lewer 3 - 27 May 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Getting to Know You is a series of portraits of people I’ve seen almost every day for the last 5 years. However though we’ve spent significant time together, there’s never been an opportunity to really look at or study these individuals; and in the context we meet, it would be odd to dwell on their features and think too long about Dave’s eye colour, the slope of Koda’s nose or the crookedness of Chris’s mouth. Removing them from our usual sporting context has allowed this study to take place. Read more

In Print

Group Exhibition 3 - 27 May 2017 Auckland City To coincide with the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival (16 - 21 May), Gow Langsford Gallery presents In Print, a group exhibition of rare and limited edition publications from a selection of prominent local and international artists including Ai Weiwei, David Hockney, Rohan Wealleans, Andy Warhol, Bettina Rheims, and Ralph Gibson. Read more

Michael Hight

5 - 29 Apr 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Michael Hight returns to Gow Langsford Gallery with a solo exhibition of paintings that revisit the subject for which he is most well-known: landscapes, both familiar and transcendental, that are populated with beehives. Read more

black white orange mountain

Ugo Rondinone 5 - 29 Apr 2017 Auckland City black white orange mountain (2016) tests the boundary between the real and the fake, with the viewer constantly engaged in this interplay. While the stone medium evokes objects found in nature, this is immediately disrupted by bold coatings of industrial paint, bringing the authenticity of the material under question. Read more

The Geometrics

Paul Dibble 8 Mar - 1 Apr 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Geometric Figures express Paul Dibble’s ongoing interest in the aesthetics of pure forms. They were first produced in the late 90s and in early 2000 and signified a shift from works which had used a more narrative basis of themes. The works are all figurative in content with the human form reduced to simple geometric shapes. Some of the works have straight or bowed props seeming to support the shapes. The mathematical forms give the works a cool surreal elegance yet at the same time the figures are highly gestural, reflecting a strong sense of humanity. Read more

Damien Hirst

8 Mar - 1 Apr 2017 Auckland City From animals encased in formaldehyde, jewel encrusted skulls, and works adorned with the wings of butterflies, Damien Hirst’s approach to creating art is unprecedented. Playing with appearances, Hirst is a master of manipulating the human eye and what we traditionally associate with certain images. Read more

Golden Age

Pat Hanly 8 Feb - 3 Mar 2017 Auckland City Throughout his career Pat Hanly (1932-2004) expressed his responses to matters of social conscience in contemporary New Zealand with an impassioned vision. His paintings are characteristically vibrant, while his subjects are variously political; reflective of the human psyche; and, in his observations of family and friends, personal. This exhibition brings together a collection of painted works and limited editions for his first solo exhibition at Gow Langsford. Read more

Cross Rhythms

Allen Maddox 8 Feb - 3 Mar 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Allen Maddox (1948-2000) is remembered as being one of New Zealand’s finest exponents of abstract expressionism. His work, spanning over three decades, investigates the tensions between structure and gesture, primarily utilising the motifs of grids and crosses. Read more

Summer Exhibition

Group Exhibition 18 Jan - 4 Feb 2017 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery starts our 2017 calendar with a largely monochromatic painting exhibition. It includes works by Don Binney, Hugo Koha Lindsay, Richard Lewer, Reuben Paterson, Colin McCahon, Max Gimblett and Gordon Walters. Read more

Liu Ke He Mogo Fakapa He Haaku a Moui

John Pule 23 Nov - 24 Dec 2016 Auckland City Return To The First Time of My Life / Liu Ke He Mogo Fakapa He Haaku a Moui was painted on the island of Niue, John Pule's homeland, where he has spent much of this year. It is the first time since he immigrated to New Zealand as a young... Read more

Butterfly Effect

Sara Hughes 23 Nov - 24 Dec 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Building upon my last exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery in 2014, I continue to develop my interest in the complexities of visual learning. In Butterfly Effect I combine influences from observing my children with languages of painting. Familiar images such as children's stickers, striped electrical tape and geometric shaped toys,... Read more

Escape From Salvation Part III: The Dick Frizzell Group Show

Dick Frizzell 26 Oct - 19 Nov 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Eccentric artist Dick Frizzell needs no introduction. Easily one of the most recognisable artists of our time, Frizzell has brought us iconic imagery, and design through painting for the past 50 years; with no sign of slowing down yet. When thinking about this solo exhibition and the preparation towards it,... Read more

Lee Ufan

26 Oct - 19 Nov 2016 Auckland City Gow Langford Gallery presents a selection of works from the highly regarded, formative modernist painter and sculptor Lee Ufan. This will be his first solo exhibition in New Zealand. Read more

Dear Stranger

Graham Fletcher 28 Sep - 3 Oct 2016 Auckland City Dear Stranger sets the scene for strange encounters. Recalling first contact experiences between Western and non-Western peoples, thesenew works further examine aspects of the highly complex and dynamic relationships that develop when histories, cultures and identities collide and intermingle. From within these borderline environments, masks, totems, Van Gogh flowers and... Read more

Hugo Koha Lindsay

28 Sep - 20 Oct 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery are pleased to exhibit new works from young, emerging Auckland artist, Hugo Koha Lindsay. Currently working towards a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, Lindsay is already making waves with a number of exhibitions throughout the country. Last year, at the 24th Annual Wallace... Read more

Turning the World Inside Out: 30 Years a Painter

Judy Millar 31 Aug - 24 Sep 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] While working on a group of new paintings during the summer of 2015 Judy Millar had a flashback to a work painted almost 30 years earlier. She was struck by the similarity between a work she had painted in 1987 and her new work both in palette and the overlaid drawn line used to establish depth in the image. Comparison between the works revealed the consistency with which she has worked over the past 30 years. It made evident her determined search to find a way to paint paintings that are both abstract and yet full of imagery. Read more

Dale Frank

31 Aug - 24 Sep 2016 Auckland City Renowned Australian artist, Dale Frank, returns to Gow Langsford with a selection of new abstract paintings. The works in this exhibition are smaller in scale than the large scale paintings we have come to expect from Frank. The smaller size, however, in no way inhibits or restricts Frank. In these works Frank returns to a monochromatic palette pouring the thick coloured varnish onto mirrored Perspex. Many of the works have additional materials added to the surface such as crushed glass or globules of solid varnish which make them more complex both visually and structurally. While the controlled exploitation of varnish has been Frank’s signature of the past decades, the use of even more unconventional materials continues Frank’s ongoing exploration of the concept of painting.

Dale Frank is one of Australia’s leading pioneers of contemporary art. His works are held in numerous collections and institutes worldwide including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA, and all major public institutions in Australia. Read more

Resident

James Cousins 3 - 27 Aug 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] James Cousins' new exhibition, Resident, presents a series of new works developing upon earlier thematic ideals and painterly constructs. These rich works create visually active, stimulating paintings that carry an appearance or currency of transmitted data. In a completely digital age, Cousins' accumulated layers delay and compound acts of looking.... Read more

Plain View

David McCracken 3 - 27 Aug 2016 Auckland City David McCracken’s newest exhibition, Plain View, brings one of his ongoing concepts of the ‘bomb’ to fruition. In recent years, the bomb form has been an evolutionary process for McCracken, thematically and artistically, as well as through his own personal connection to the objects.

The bombs are based on the forms of early aircraft delivered bombs deployed in 1944; in particular the Tallboy and Grandslam models. Both of these famous bombs were designed by British aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis. McCracken recalls the photographs of the bombs that he saw as a young boy and found himself drawn to the purity and the elegance of their form. It was following this that he delved into their historical use, development and deployment. Despite the destructive nature of these bombs and their historical context, these sculpture realisations have an inviting quality to them. On the surface, they are shiny and covetable; they entice the viewer in and reflect their surroundings back to us. They look luxurious and lavish, with the fear that should shroud them having been stripped away; their true purpose lost. They now take the form of these playful, aesthetic, inflatable toys that transcend their materiality; a stark contrast to the utilitarian objects that they have been derived from.

Their playful and whimsical quality does not, however, represent the labour intensive process that is undertaken to manufacture them. Each bomb is individually fabricated from McCracken’s own designs using stainless steel plates that are hydroformed under pressure to generate the organic wrinkles and folds, giving the material a lightness that realistically it does not have. They have subtle differences, unique to each bomb. The reflective finish is achieved by grounding and polishing the stainless steel, with a final lick of coloured industrial paint completing the sculptures. Read more

Exodus

Darryn George 5 - 30 Jul 2016 Auckland City Established Christchurch based artist, Darryn George, returns to Gow Langsford Gallery with his fifth solo exhibition, Exodus. Read more

Shadow V

Alex Monteith 15 Jun - 2 Jul 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In August 1979 an IRA bomb was detonated aboard the 30ft fishing boat Shadow V over the reefs of the Mullaghmore coast, Co. Sligo, Ireland. The blast claimed the lives of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (aged 79), Doreen (dowager) Lady Brabourne (83), Nicholas Knatchbull (14), and Paul... Read more

Return to the Miniature Garden

Michael Hight 18 May - 11 Jun 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Michael Hight has shown with Gow Langsford Gallery since it opened in the late 1980s. Known widely for his realist landscape paintings, Return to the Miniature Garden follows Dreams of Children (2012) and Crossing The Line (2014) and is the third exhibition of newer ‘black paintings’ at Gow Langsford, which are gaining a momentum of their own.

As in earlier series’ childhood memory informs this body of work and a key reference for this exhibition is the miniature garden that countless New Zealand children had to make in the 1960s. Baking trays, tins and saucers were appropriated to make small, idealised versions of reality. The miniature garden was an act of making but also an act of scavenging and making do. Hight began his exploration of his now chosen technique of ‘black painting’ in 2008, noting a significant shift from his earlier iconic beehive paintings. The black paintings can be viewed as theatrical tableaux that feature memorabilia, historical moments and specific landscapes. Objects range from the absurd model of a C20 dreadnought battle ship to automata (wind-up toys) with their inferred staccato movements to an outdated telephone exchange. This series includes numerous scales with homely links to colonial kitchens and baking, and undercurrent issues of justice and the weighing up of how things were done.

Place is equally diverse. Kapuni Stream, a painting that juxtaposes kitchen scales with two pa sites, is the location of one of the earliest conflicts between Maori and Pakeha. Rakiura - Gog and Magog represents Stewart Island’s two remote mountains that were named after Celtic giants. Settings resonate from the rugged landscape of a central North-Island sheep station to a more picturesque view of Mt Taranaki from Pembroke Road. All paintings have an autobiographical element — none more so than Pohokura, which features the Aunt Martha’s ballpoint paint tubes that had mesmerised a young boy in the 1960s. Anecdote and memory circulate above both land and object to the extent the paintings are also the works of a storyteller who keeps secrets as much as he reveals. Yet standing before a musical toy or a green ridged hill is to step into your own anecdote and buffeting memory.

For further information on Hight, the publication Michael Hight: Crossing The Line (2014) by Michael Hight and Gow Langsford Gallery is available to purchase. It provides an overview of his previous works, with essays by Gregory O’Brien and Dr. Paula Green and includes a conversation between John Gow and Michael Hight. Read more

Represented Artists

Group Exhibition 18 May - 11 Jun 2016 Auckland City To coincide and compliment Gow Langsford’s presence at the Auckland Art Fair, our latest group exhibition features a selection of Gow Langsford Gallery Artists.

Artists that will be exhibited include; Chris Heaphy, Darryn George, David McCracken, Graham Fletcher, Gregor Kregar, Judy Millar, Karl Maughan, Martin Ball, Paul Dibble, Reuben Paterson, Richard Lewer, Sara Hughes, and Simon Ingram. This exhibition will provide an overall scope of works from our own New Zealand artists and those based internationally. Read more

New Representation III

Andre Hemer 20 Apr - 14 May 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] New Representation Part III, Andre Hemer’s debut solo exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery is an exhibition of paintings that are a response, but not necessarily an answer, to this question. The new paintings continue the artist’s inquiry into the role of painting in a world dominated by digital media and the slippages in meaning between object and image. “Hemer describes his work as embodying a ‘new representation’, a term he coined during his PhD to describe the painting he is making. “You have these terms like post-internet but new representation speaks more generally to the idea that, because the way we consume and create media has changed so markedly over the last decade, the way we represent the world must change because of that. This is about how you represent all this dematerialized form in the world – how you rematerialize it.” (Mark Amery, Art Collector, 2016)

Hemer’s approach to painting is typically y-gen in its use of both physical and digital mechanisms. Using a method akin to a modern day ‘en plein air’ painting (a flat-bed scanner left open under the autumn sky of Tuscany) Hemer scans painted sculptural forms to create the background of his compositions. The combination of the light sources (the LED light of the scanner from below and the fading sunlight) create images that look digital but are not produced in a digital way. The images are then overworked with spray paint, acrylic, oil and very three-dimensional impasto to create visually dynamic compositions. The combination of techniques is reflected in the difficulty in describing the finished works in more traditional painting terms.

Hemer’s works have earned him international recognition. His work is on the cover of Thames and Hudson’s publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow (2014). The book uncovered the world’s most promising painters from more than 30 countries. He was also named by The Guardian newspaper as one of their top ten favourites to watch. Read more

Happy Medium

Group Exhibition 20 Apr - 14 May 2016 Auckland City Happy Medium is a curated exhibition of works on paper by four artists. For the artists in this exhibition: Richard Lewer, Bernar Venet, Pablo Picasso and Max Gimblett; this medium presents different possibilities to their primary artistic practices. Read more

From Here on In

Chris Heaphy 16 Apr - 3 Jul 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Chris Heaphy art exhibition. New paintings by great artist Read more

Mongrel Mob Portraits

Jono Rotman 23 Mar - 16 Apr 2016 Auckland City Jono Rotman mongrel mob, NZ photography Read more

One Day in the Afternoon of the Gods

Max Gimblett 24 Feb - 19 Mar 2016 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Max Gimblett exhibition 2016 Read more

Paintings

Jan de Vliegher 27 Jan - 19 Feb 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Paintings by Belgian artist Jan de Vliegher is made up of works from three series (2012-2015), each defined by its focus on a singular subject matter, and is characterised by the artist's ability to straddle realism and abstraction in each composition. As introduced in his debut exhibition at Gow Langsford... Read more

OBJET D'ART

Group Exhibition 27 Jan - 19 Feb 2016 Auckland City Objet d'art is an object-based group exhibition titled after the French term which simply translates to 'art object'. When categorizing art, works generally fall into a number of large groups: painting, sculpture, photography, installation and so on. The remaining works, after the larger groups have been formed, can often fall... Read more

Five Painters

Group Exhibition 12 - 23 Jan 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Five Painters is a cross selection of five contemporary New Zealand artists, each with a distinct approach to painting. Read more

Halcombe

Karl Maughan 9 Dec 2015 - 23 Jan 2016 Auckland City In his latest exhibition, Halcombe, Karl Maughan continues with the garden theme for which he is now famous. He returns to his familiar rhododendron subjects in these vibrant compositions. Alongside the new works, Gow Langsford Gallery will also show Salamanca Road, an epic nine metre work commissioned by the Dowse Museum Wellington for his solo exhibition there in 2014. Read more

The Aroma of Black (Part III)

Reuben Paterson 9 Dec 2015 - 9 Jan 2016 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] For The Aroma of Black (Part III) Paterson returns to his exploration of textile traditions. Where earlier works borrowed from fabrics he associated with the maternal side of his family, these new works take their inspiration from botanical subjects and reference still life paintings by 17th century Dutch painters. His ideas are translated into carefully constructed glitter paintings which, for the first time at Gow Langsford Gallery, use a more intricate method that creates smoother, more graduated depth to the textured surfaces. Read more

Still

Martin Ball 11 Nov - 5 Dec 2015 Auckland City In Still motorcycles, with all their associations with macho and speed, are lovingly painted in Martin Ball’s signature realist style. The effect is an unexpected comparison between subject and methodology.

Ball is known for his realist paintings and drawings and although motorcycles are a subject he has touched upon in the past, he is best known for his large-scale portraits. Interestingly, his motorcycle subjects are treated in a similar manner to his figurative works – refined edges, obsessive attention to detail, closely cropped, exquisite brushwork and a softness of touch. All of which imbue these works with an intense calmness that defies the nature of the motorcycles themselves. Read more

Lost World

Gregor Kregar 11 Nov - 5 Dec 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In Lost world sculptor Gregor Kregar combines structures made from recycled glass with large stylized bronze dinosaurs. Through this unusual juxtaposition the artist creates an environment to surprise and engage the viewer. Kregar’s interest in dinosaurs was sparked by observing his four year old’s fascination for these creatures. Intrigued by reading him dinosaur books before bed each night and finding plastic replica all over the house, the artist was spurred to create his own setting in which to bring these prehistoric animals to life. Read more

Bound Communication and Stories of Love

Lisa Roet 14 Oct - 5 Nov 2015 Auckland City This new body of work for Gow Langsford Gallery looks at ways of communication and stories of Love. Through her signatory image of the ape bust, Roet expresses moments of communication and emotion as she has witnessed through her research into Primate body and sign language at zoos, ape language research centres and residencies with primatologists worldwide. Made form bronze, carrara marble and gold plated bronze, Roet plays with mediums reminiscent of a decadent past. Read more

1960s

Group Exhibition 14 Oct - 5 Nov 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The 1960s were a golden age of God, Queen and Country for New Zealand. Encouraged by a strong economy, the nation enjoyed one of the world’s highest standards of living. Fashion, politics, music and the visual arts flourished and chased away post-war gloom. As wider audiences responded to increased opportunities to engage with art the appetite for the visual arts grew substantially. Read more

Spring Catalogue 2015

Group Exhibition 16 Sep - 10 Oct 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The annual Spring Catalogue began in 1995 and has concentrated on presenting high value secondary market artworks by both New Zealand and international artists. This year’s publication is a break from this tradition and focusses on the artists represented by the gallery. Read more

Russell Clark

19 Aug - 12 Sep 2015 Auckland City Russell Clark (1905-1966) was a painter, sculptor and an influential teacher and illustrator. His painted scenes of modernist New Zealand landscape, rural Maori life, and modernist sculptures give him a unique position in New Zealand art history. This exhibition is a rare opportunity to see a dynamic collection of works from the artist’s family, some of which have not previously been shown Read more

Paintings

George ‘Hairbrush’ Tjungurrayi 19 Aug - 12 Sep 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] George ‘Hairbrush’ Tjungurrayi (b. circa 1947) is a celebrated Aboriginal painter. Made up of shades of colour and optical lines, Tjungurrayi’s paintings are based on the “Dreaming” – the stories owned by different Aboriginal tribes and their members that explain the creation of life, people and animals. George predominantly conveys aspects of “Tingari Dreaming”, the sacred ancestral journeys of men and women who travelled throughout the country and shaped the landscape. His works refer to sacred sites located in his ancestral country including his homelands Wala Wala, Kiwikurra, Lake Mackay and Kintore. Read more

Dale Frank

22 Jul - 15 Aug 2015 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The viewer becomes protagonist in Dale Frank’s new series of works. Where earlier works are partially reflective through the use of high gloss varnish, in this new series Frank replaces canvas with mirrored Perspex, allowing the viewer to become an integral part of the work. The works will be exhibited at both gallery spaces and a catalogue will be available. Read more

The Chief of the Canoe

Colin McCahon 24 Jun - 18 Jul 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Colin McCahon: Chief of the Canoe is a collection of significant works by Colin McCahon. The title of the exhibition borrows from the eight panelled The Canoe Tainui – an epical work from 1969 and metaphorically instates McCahon as a leader of twentieth century New Zealand art.

Colin McCahon: Chief of the Canoe brings together a grouping of masterworks and includes paintings from the Elias (1959), Visible Mysteries (1968) and Jump (1974) series’ and an early religious work (1947). Read more

Anzac

Laurence Aberhart 24 Jun - 18 Jul 2015 Auckland City Monuments to those who fell in the Great World War of 1914-18 can be found all over Australasia. Lovingly erected to immortalise those they remember, they appeared throughout the landscape immediately after the war. Generations gone by, they are the remnants of another time; a reminder of a faded community-mindedness. Although immediately familiar, they are taken for granted, just passed by. Here, Aberhart brings the near forgotten into focus, making protagonists of those on the edge of our collective consciousness. Read more

Withdrawn at the Request of Sue Crockford Gallery

Billy Apple 27 May - 20 Jun 2015 Auckland City At the end of 2005, Gow Langsford Gallery extended an invitation to a group of artists to participate in Frieze, an exhibition inspired by Greco-Roman architectural friezes. The gallery gave each of the artists a blank canvas to paint. These were then installed in a continuous line around the perimeter of the gallery to create a horizontal frieze of paintings.

Along with Gow Langsford’s artists, some – including Billy Apple® – were represented by other galleries. At the eleventh hour Apple’s work was withdrawn at the request of his then Auckland dealer, Sue Crockford Gallery. Unhappy with these circumstances, Apple and the gallery replaced his canvas with a wall label which read, ‘Frieze art work by Billy Apple withdrawn at the request of Sue Crockford Gallery’. Read more

Post Invisible

Group Exhibition 27 May - 20 Jun 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Post Invisible is a thematic exhibition of “white” works. Its focus is on international artists including works by seminal abstractionist Sol le Witt, American post-conceptualist Christopher Wool and photographer Isaac Layman. Read more

Paintings of the Sun

Simon Ingram 29 Apr - 23 May 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] For over a year Simon Ingram’s Radio Painting Station has been collecting energy emitted from hydrogen atoms undergoing “spin-flips” in space. The visual representation of this collection is a series of thirty concentrically circular compositions that materialise energy from the sun, and the interstellar medium, in a cartoon-like and painterly way. It is these that the artist chooses to present for his fourth solo exhibition Paintings of the Sun at Gow Langsford Gallery. Read more

Gallipoli

John Walsh 29 Apr - 23 May 2015 Auckland City Marking the centenary of the World War I Gallipoli campaign, last April painter John Walsh joined a group of artists on a journey to Gallipoli Peninsula to make work towards the exhibition entitled Your Friend the Enemy which will travel Australasia in the coming year. On this trip Walsh was drawn to the personal, often untold, narratives of men at war. Read more

It's More Than A Game

Richard Lewer 1 - 25 Apr 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Richard Lewer’s new paintings are about the game of rugby.

As to be expected from a New Zealand man living abroad, they are nostalgic, and unapologetically so. Rugby became important to Lewer when he moved to Australia. He sees the game as a connecting force – for his friends, his family, and his nation.

Lewer’s social realist practice explores stories from the realms of crime, religion and sport. He sees parallels between being an artist and an athlete – both roles rely on endurance. Read more

Up The Road

Dick Frizzell 1 - 25 Apr 2015 Auckland City There are no epic vistas or sublime sunsets in Dick Frizzell’s latest series of landscapes. The subjects in Up the Road are intentionally somewhat unspectacular. They are familiar, belonging anywhere; his farm gate could be my farm gate, it could be your gate, if you have a farm. Although there is a hint of that Frizzellean naivety, the new works are too “good” to fall strictly into his self-proclaimed “bad landscape” genre. These works are the result of the Man on the road; noting the landscape’s attractions and distractions as he goes, before working them into these wondrous (albeit at times awkward) homescapes. He takes no prisoners in defending his portrayal of everyday environments in this manner; Frizzell has long since distanced himself from the critical fraternity. Read more

Proof of Heaven

Judy Millar 3 - 28 Mar 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In her exhibition Proof Of Heaven Millar will exhibit a large group of new paintings that she has been working on over the last six months in her Berlin studio. Taking cues from the colours found in post-apocalyptic comics these works glow with an otherworldly light, mysterious and unsettlingly beautiful. Forms appear to emerge and disintegrate in an unstable world of things half-seen and impossible to recognise. Read more

Sea of Dragons

Max Gimblett 3 - 28 Mar 2015 Auckland City There is a lot written about Max Gimblett’s paintings yet there is an element of his practice that resists definition. In a sense his works are easy to define: they are mostly abstract, mostly expressionist or sometimes a bit hard-edged; there could be a reference to the divine or Eastern philosophies; they may be bright and wild or perhaps calculated and reticent. Yet beyond this lies something else, something captivating and knowing, ephemeral – something like emotion. Standing before a painting in Sea of Dragons there is an undertow of energy. It is as if these works emit fleeting pulses that are briefly tangible. Read more

New Works

Antonio Murado 28 Jan - 28 Feb 2015 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In this new series of works, Spanish-born painter Antonio Murado expands on techniques and themes from his 2012 exhibition By the Stream.
Oscillating between abstraction and representation, Murado creates conditions under which materials are made to perform and react. Relying on the chemical nature of his chosen materials, elements are put down in layers and then subsequently worked on with unusual techniques. A turpentine-soaked brush will touch over thick paint, allowing an element of chance to unfold on the surface, which is then re-worked and managed. There is an intuitive process of observation that guides what to add, what to remove and what remains. Diluted pigment is blown to form delicate petals which seem to glide across the works. Read more

The Wrong Gallery

Group Exhibition 28 Jan - 28 Feb 2015 Auckland City The Wrong Gallery was conceptualized by Maurizio Cattelan, Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni in 2005. It is a 1:6 scale reproduction of New York’s smallest exhibition space of the same name, which they founded together in 2002. Subsequent versions have been shown all over the world including at Tate Modern (2005). Our rendition of The Wrong Gallery will be installed in our Kitchener St Gallery and will, fittingly, be filled with miniature artworks by gallery artists. Read more

Spring Catalogue 2014

Group Exhibition 13 Oct - 8 Nov 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The tradition of the Spring Catalogue is well established at Gow Langsford. This year, along with the significant featured works, we take you behind the scenes and offer a more personal account of the Gallery’s past year of events and exhibitions. Read more

Natural Selection

Chris Heaphy 13 Oct - 8 Nov 2014 Auckland City This new exhibition of works by gallery artist Chris Heaphy can be viewed as a lesson in the art of looking. While Heaphy provides us with representation, profiles and symbols that are instantly recognizable as they migrate across the canvas, the question of what we really see remains. Is this... Read more

Sing a Rainbow

Sara Hughes 17 Sep - 11 Oct 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] This Spring, Gow Langsford Gallery Lorne St will exhibit a new collection of paintings by Sara Hughes. Sing a Rainbow (17 September - 11 October) continues Hughes' observation and study of colour and perception. Hughes' embarks on extensive research for each body of work she produces, her paintings becoming charts and data vehicles for colour studies, which have often focused on global issues of economic growth and demise, illustrated using finance and crop harvesting models. Hughes' latest project concentrates on the development of visual systems in children and has been inspired by her young family. In the statement below Hughes' gives context to her new collection which explores a development each of us once experienced, the discovery of the world as we view it. Read more

Lucid Dream, Black Rose, Glass Box

Hye Rim Lee 17 Sep - 11 Oct 2014 Auckland City Lucid Dream, Black Rose, Glass Box is a photography, mural and sculpture exhibition which deconstructs dreamspaces from a narrative to an infinite dream, reflecting Hye Rim Lee's ongoing 3D animation project, Black Rose. Read more

Gordon Walters

Gordon Walters 3 - 13 Sep 2014 Auckland City Collectively, Walters' artworks form one of the most important bodies of work ever produced in New Zealand and his geometric abstractions have become somewhat emblematic of New Zealand art. The exhibition of ten works brings together key elements of his oeuvre, highlights of which are three rarely seen koru paintings. The exhibition runs concurrent to The Walters Prize 2014 exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery. Read more

Phantom Cube

Graham Fletcher 20 Aug - 13 Sep 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Graham Fletcher's first solo exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery, Phantom Cube, continues to explore themes of cultural appropriation created by the European tradition of housing collections of Oceanic and African Tribal art in domestic settings. Totems, 'primitive' structures and tribal objects are collaged into modern interior and exterior-scapes generating illogical conjunctions that bring into light aspects of borderless states and the de-familiarisation of cultures through juxtaposition. Although these new works can be viewed through the lens of post colonialism and its use of traditional ethnographic forms, they also share common ground with the works of Dada and Surrealist artists in their references to the collision of cultures through disparate objects. It is through this blending of cultural and Modernist elements that these works talk about aspects of authenticity, cultural interaction and the assimilation of indigenous peoples within the Western landscape,

Graham Fletcher has been a practicing artist since 1997 and has exhibited extensively both in New Zealand and abroad, He has works in significant private and public collections and has also received numerous awards and grants including the Wallace Arts Trust Development Award (2010). Read more

Yves Klein Franz Kline

Michael Thomson 20 Aug - 13 Sep 2014 Auckland City Australian based artist Michael Thomson has explored the practice of drawing for the majority of his career, focusing in particular on the drawing of paintings and photographs. His current exhibition YvesKleinFranzKlineYvesKleinFranzKline is inspired by the colours and works of Absract Expressionist artists Yves Klein and Franz Kline. Thomson has created large-scale pencil drawings with both a painterly quality and depth in colour.
Read more

Levels of Abstraction

Group Exhibition 23 Jul - 16 Aug 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Where abstraction was once a radical movement away from natural depiction and the illusion of reality, it has now become a central and ongoing concern for artists across the globe. Levels of Abstraction reflects contemporary concerns of artists working in the field of abstraction, their engagement with a substantial art history and development of its language. Read more

Register

Darryn George 23 Jul - 16 Aug 2014 Auckland City Darryn George's new collection, Register, continues George's study in symbols as well as systems of filing and data collection. The new works are simplistic but bear reference to clipboards and card catalogue systems, as well as illustrating George's interest in playing matte and high-gloss finishes off against each other. Read more

Crossing The Line

Michael Hight 25 Jun - 19 Jul 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The 2012 exhibition The Dreams of Children signalled a shift in Michael Hight’s painting practice. The black paintings had a dramatic and nocturnal quality which is extended in Crossing the Line as the new works continue Hight’s fascination with memory, archives, encyclopaedias and the surprising relations between things. Each work is like a theatrical tableau placed upon a shelf against a black backdrop for the viewer to behold. A handful of elements are juxtaposed to produce multiple effects—luminous paintwork, autobiographical threads, historical narratives, psychological judders, allegory, metaphor and so on. In contrast to Hight’s beehive paintings, these works feature landscape on a reduced scale. It is partitioned off and rattles against the things and people placed in the scene. At times, the paintings generate a sense of unease, the macabre, the unfamiliar, a visual puzzle. At other times, the effect is nostalgic, moving, deeply familiar. Read more

Emotionally Unsaturated

David McCracken 25 Jun - 19 Jul 2014 Auckland City In Emotionally Unsaturated David McCracken works industrial materials into fluid form, filling the space with stainless and cor-ten steel structures that surpass our material expectations. Read more

The Gold Thread

Max Gimblett 28 May - 21 Jun 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Gold Thread is a new collection of work from the Max Gimblett studio in New York. The colourful gilded works in their tropical colours are spiritual and alive, with acid palettes and bold clear brushwork. The dark works, in contrast, are more serious. Studio manager, Matt Jones, describes them as 'answers to questions', they've decided what's right and what's wrong. The gold and silver works represent individualism; they are old magicians, as though heading for retirement, leaving behind their alchemy. Read more

Jono Rotman

30 Apr - 24 May 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In 2014 Gow Langsford Gallery exhibited a series of portraits by New York-based New Zealander Jono Rotman. The large format photographs of patched members of the Mongrel Mob were the subject of intense public debate. Read more

All That Glitters

Group Exhibition 30 Apr - 24 May 2014 Auckland City A group exhibition including works by gallery artists Max Gimblett, Judy Millar and Reuben Paterson. Read more

FRIEZE

Group Exhibition 2 - 26 Apr 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery presents Frieze an exhibition of over thirty new paintings and photographs by New Zealand artists. Inspired by the Roman architectural tradition Frieze brings together a diverse collection of contemporary artworks to conclude our exhibition schedule for 2010. Artists were invited to create new works which when hung collectively create a frieze around the entire gallery space. Working within the existing architectural elements of the gallery space, the works range in format and the diversity of medium and subject reflect the range of artists. Read more

FREEZE

Group Exhibition 2 - 26 Apr 2014 Auckland City The group exhibition Freeze celebrates artworks that have been inspired by the coldest regions of the globe, and includes work by gallery represented and invited artists. Read more

Jan De Vliegher

8 - 29 Mar 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In association with Mike Weiss Gallery, New York, Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present the first exhibition of Jan De Vliegher’s paintings in New Zealand. Read more

Maori: Tradition and Object

Group Exhibition 5 - 29 Mar 2014 Auckland City Maori: Tradition and Object brings together a collection of important Maori artefacts displayed alongside the luminous paintings of Gottfried Lindauer. Read more

1993 – 2003: A Decade in the Making

Shane Cotton 5 Feb - 1 Mar 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] A decade culminating in a respective exhibition held at City Gallery Wellington and Auckland Art Gallery marks a period of significant importance in Shane Cotton’s career. The works chosen as part of Gow Langsford Gallery’s 1993 – 2003: A Decade in the Making include pivotal early works alongside major works from the early 2000s. Read more

Colour – System – Support

Group Exhibition 5 Feb - 1 Mar 2014 Auckland City Colour – System – Support is a curated group exhibition that brings together four artists who address modernist thought – each pushing and re-figuring painting into new contexts. All of the featured works are painted on the support of metal, as opposed to paper or canvas, which affects the density and weight of colour on their surface. The exhibition is made up of works by two German painters, Gunther Forg and Katharina Grosse and two New Zealanders, Stephen Bambury and Judy Millar, thus adding an international context to the conversation around systems of painting. Read more

Full Circle

Group Exhibition 4 Dec 2013 - 1 Feb 2014 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Full Circle is a group exhibition which examines the way in which a number of contemporary artists use the tondo as a form on which to work.

An ancient shape that stretches back to the beginnings of time, first recorded in replicas of the sun and moon, the tondo, or circle, has long been linked with religion and mythology as well as with nature. The shape of the circle symbolises eternity and creating a circular work of art results in giving it a wholeness, as well as a sense of movement and energy gained from freeing the painted surface from more restrained square and rectangular stretchers.

Full Circle includes work by three key gallery artists, Reuben Paterson, Dale Frank and Max Gimblett. Read more

Long View

Karl Maughan 6 - 30 Nov 2013 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The much anticipated new exhibition by Karl Maughan, Long View, opens tomorrow evening at both our Lorne and Kitchener St galleries. The hyper-real compositions of Karl Maughan's oil paintings transport viewers down a garden path and into painterly expressions of vibrant colour and light. Outdoor environments, manicured by the artist,... Read more

The Dance of the Hooligans

Dick Frizzell 2 Oct - 2 Nov 2013 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] It’s been a big twelve months. We moved back to Auckland after nine years of bucolic splendour in Hawkes Bay. And I turned seventy. One of these events prompted an enormous upheaval of several storage systems and the other a reflective rummage through the subsequently exposed archive. A lot of... Read more

New Structures

Gregor Kregar 4 - 28 Sep 2013 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In 1962 architect Buckminster Fuller imagined a floating city of Cloud Structures thatwere intended to alleviate the politics of land ownership, aid conservation of nature and liberate humankind's dependency on the earth. The imaginary potential and influence of utopian architectural aspirations is an important underlying influence of Gregor Kregar's practice,... Read more

God Created Me In His Own Image

Richard Lewer 4 - 28 Sep 2013 Auckland City This work continues my interests in extreme behaviour, subcultures and the human condition, and specifically considers people or events of faith, healing, mysticism and tradition teachings in one form or another. Last year because of a myriad of health concerns I moved to Fremantle, WA to take some time out... Read more

New Works 2013

Group Exhibition 31 Jul - 31 Aug 2013 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] To coincide with the Auckland Art Fair Gallery artists were invited to create new works for a group exhibition. Along with our two stands at the Auckland Art Fair, the exhibition will show case the diversity of local artists represented by Gow Langsford Gallery. Including works by Sara Hughes, Reuben... Read more

Spring Catalogue 2013

Group Exhibition 31 Jul - 31 Aug 2013 Auckland City Every year we look forward to selecting an exciting collection of work, from local and international artists, for the Gow Langsford Gallery Spring Catalogue. This year, to coincide with the exhibition at our Auckland gallery, we will also present highlights of the Spring Catalogue exhibition at the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair in September. Read more

The Big Picture

Group Exhibition 10 - 27 Jul 2013 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] A group exhibition of large paintings including work by Allen Maddox, Dale Frank Judy Millar and Michael Smither. Read more

Interview With A Painting

Simon Ingram 10 - 27 Jul 2013 Auckland City In Interview with a Painting Simon Ingram reverses some the machinic codes of his recent work for a more direct dialogue with each painting. Rather than look upwards and outwards to radio energy and space, the paintings in this exhibition are interested in a dialogue with the artist, the studio,... Read more

Recent Paintings

John Walsh 12 Jun - 6 Jul 2013 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In London, 1818, two young Maori chefs, Tui and Titiri, produced some of the earliest Maori naturalistic drawings, in the form of ink sketches of war canoes. In this exhibition of new works by John Walsh, the painting The Voyagers depicts figures from Tui and Titiri's drawings as they are... Read more

The Titirangi Years, 1953 – 1959

Colin McCahon 12 Jun - 6 Jul 2013 Auckland City In what is now known as the French Bay House in the West Auckland suburb of Titirangi, painter Colin McCahon produced some of his most consequential works. With the shift from the South Island to Auckland with his family in 1953 came a new direction in his painting and the... Read more

Monument

Group Exhibition 15 May - 8 Jun 2013 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] MONUMENT: featuring Anthony Goicolea is an exhibition of photographic works timed to coincide with the Auckland Festival of Photography 2013.

Cuban-American, New York based photographer Anthony Goicolea has shown with Gow Langsford Gallery since 2003. His earlier photographs, in which he frequently appeared as protagonist, addressed ideas around child sexuality, androgyny and homosexuality. His more recent works employ similarly sophisticated production techniques of manipulating images in post-production. The works included here are from his Pathetic Fallacy (2011) and DecemberMay (2010) series’. Alongside Goicolea's work, works by preeminent international photographers will be shown; including works from Miao Xiaochun’s The last judgement in Cyberspace series and photographs by Isaac Layman, Michael Wolf, Tracey Moffatt and Marco Breuer. Works by New Zealand local photographer Laurence Aberhart are also included. Read more

As Rembrandt Would Have Painted The Maori

Charles F. Goldie 15 May - 8 Jun 2013 Auckland City Charles F. Goldie is undoubtedly one of New Zealand's most famous artists and Gow Langsford Gallery is delighted to host As Rembrandt Would Have Painted the Maori, the first one-man exhibition of his works in a dealer gallery for six decades. Although enlivened by controversy, his paintings are fabled in... Read more

Andy Warhol

17 Apr - 11 May 2013 Auckland City The work of Andy Warhol needs little introduction. As America took a turn from the conventional conservatism that ruled the ‘50s into the swinging sixties – a new time of cultural liberty, frivolity, and mass-production and consumerism emerged. As a pioneering artist of the associated artistic movement of Pop Art, Andy Warhol’s now world-famous work explores the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement. This exhibition covers major themes in his works – skulls, Chairman Mao, Marilyn and the electric chairs. Read more

New Work '13

James Cousins 17 Apr - 11 May 2013 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Developing and expanding on themes evident in his earlier exhibitions Signal (2009) and Accent (2011), in New Work’13 James Cousins continues to intertwine and enmesh abstraction with figuration in his reticent and illusional works. As in earlier series’, these paintings are constructed through compounded layers of processes. They combine intricate and systemised pattern-making procedures with unmediated spontaneous acts. Impossible tensions arise in the tenuous meeting of his pictorial subjects (in this case flora taken from a published anthology of plants) and material working processes of the paintings themselves. This is compounded in some works by deliberate and heavy overworking of otherwise delicate and fragile paint surfaces. Read more

Comic Drop

Judy Millar 20 Mar - 13 Apr 2013 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Comic Drop an exhibition of new works by gallery artist Judy Millar. Millar is one of New Zealand's most exciting contemporary painters who shares her time between a remote property at Anawhata and inner city Berlin - where her career continues to gain momentum. Comic Drop brings together a series of new works that combine exaggerated enlargements of handmade gestures with vivid colour. In these works Millar continues to takes on the history of expressive painting and turn it inside out.

Recent career highlights include two exhibitions at the Venice Biennale representing New Zealand with her solo exhibition Giraffe-Bottle-Gun 2009; and in Time, Space, Existence a curated exhibition at Pallazo Bembo in 2011. Her work is about to be featured in a large exhibition of star international art in the Czech Republic and an upcoming solo exhibition at IMA Brisbane, Australia. Read more

Mrkusich / Thornley

Group Exhibition 20 Mar - 13 Apr 2013 Auckland City This collection of paintings brings together works by seminal New Zealand abstract painters Milan Mrkusich (b.1925) and Geoff Thornley (b. 1942). As the transition from representation to abstraction occurred in New Zealand art history in the mid-twentieth century, abstract artists faced widespread antagonism. As a young artist Mrkusich’s works were often met with criticism as they outlandishly deterred from the well-known regional concerns of contemporaries such as Colin McCahon and Rita Angus, yet by the 1970s he was firmly established as a leading exponent of modernist art in New Zealand. Thornley, seventeen years his junior, has similarly remained loyal to abstraction and throughout his career has engaged with explorations of colour and its emotive effects. Spanning two decades, the works in Milan Mrkusich and Geoff Thornley provide a snapshot of twentieth century New Zealand abstraction, comparing and contrasting two painters who, through their commitment to abstraction, have both emerged as influential artists of their generation. Read more

Tony Fomison: A Portrait

Tony Fomison & Shirley Grace 27 Feb - 16 Mar 2013 Auckland City This exhibition of photographs of Tony Fomison by Shirley Grace, shown alongside Fomison’s own paintings, prints and ceramics offers a unique insight into one of this country’s most recognised post-war painters.

Fomison (1939-1990), like his paintings, is said to have had an intensity and presence that is somewhat difficult to define. Reflected in his works in a lifetime spent of observation and documentation of his immediate environments, here, Grace’s photographs offer a kind of counter observation of the artist himself. Read more

Temporary Mechanisms

Alex Monteith 17 Feb - 16 Mar 2013 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Temporary Mechanisms is Alex Monteith’s first solo exhibition with Gow Langsford Gallery. Monteith is a prolific contemporary film maker known for her technically sophisticated video installations that reflect contemporary sports, cultural and social activities. Her works are typically performance and time-based; employing media such as film, sound, and video, and are often created in extreme or large-scale geographies. Read more

International Sculpture

Group Exhibition 23 Jan - 23 Feb 2013 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] International Sculpture at our Lorne St Gallery is an exhibition of international sculpture including works by Henry Moore, Tony Cragg, Katsuyo Aoki and Bernar Venet alongside local sculptors Gregor Kregar, Paul Dibble and David McCracken. Timed to coincide with the International Sculpture Symposium, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see works of this calibre, from such diverse studios, alongside each other in Auckland. Read more

Summer Show

Group Exhibition 23 Jan - 23 Feb 2013 Auckland City Summer Show is an exhibition of recent paintings by gallery artists, providing a dynamic take on the tradition of the Summer Group show. Read more

Reflective Synthesis

Gregor Kregar 29 Nov - 31 Dec 2012 Auckland City Popular in working class and suburban gardens for decades, the garden gnome is now somewhat an icon of popular culture. Widely associated with kitsch and the decorative, the little bearded pranksters with paunches are beloved friends that inhabit gardens all around the world. Yet despite their Disney appeal, gnomes have... Read more

The Ballad of the South Pacific

Max Gimblett 28 Nov - 31 Dec 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The monumental works of The Ballad of the South Pacific began as most of Max's paintings begin. Stretchers are ordered to his specifications from an art supply company in Brooklyn and arrive a week later. Giovanni Forlino and Kristen Reyes, Max’s two studio assistants, stretch number twelve cotton duck over... Read more

Harvest

Sara Hughes 31 Oct - 24 Nov 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Sara Hughes’ painting practice can be characterized by an on-going fascination with the effects of pattern, structure, colour and optics on our understanding of the world. For her latest exhibition, Harvest, Hughes brings together a series of works that utilize different materials and surfaces to create an installation that is... Read more

Portraits of Mass and Transmission

David McCracken 31 Oct - 24 Nov 2012 Auckland City Transcending our expectations of his chosen materials new works in David McCracken's exhibition Portraits of Mass and Transmission appear at once industrial yet have an organic quality. Large-scale works made of Corten-steel dominate the exhibition space and despite their size, have a light whimsy quality that is incongruous with the... Read more

The Ghost of the Huia and The Orchard

Paul Dibble 3 - 27 Oct 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In his exhibition of new sculptures, The Ghost of the Huia and The Orchard, Paul Dibble extends his amalgamation of Cor-ten steel with cast bronze. In a glorious juxtaposition of function and aesthetic play the two materials demonstrate a fascinating use of contrast. By methods of cutting, measuring and bending... Read more

In Through The Outdoor

Karl Maughan 3 - 27 Oct 2012 Auckland City Gow Langsford Gallery hosted Karl Maughan's first solo exhibition in 1989. Even as a young artist Maughan was captivated by what would later emerge as his signature subject - the garden. Maughan has since found inspiration for his fictitious settings around the globe and, although ever faithful to his subject,... Read more

Spring Catalogue 2012

Celebrating 25 Years 9 - 29 Sep 2012 Auckland City Gow Langsford Gallery was established by John Gow and Gary Langsford in a converted gas station in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn in 1987. The premises added new meaning to the expression that it was started on the smell of an oily rag. Although not entirely humble beginnings (oysters... Read more

Twice Upon A Time

Reuben Paterson 5 - 29 Sep 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Twice Upon a Time marks a significant leap for Reuben Paterson, from the familiarity of his glitter paintings into the 3-dimensional space of sculpture. The issue of depth is an ongoing concern of Paterson’s work, which uses light to animate and open up painting’s flat pictorial plane, and to challenge... Read more

Dreams Of Children

Michael Hight 8 Aug - 1 Sep 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Artist Micheal Hight is well-known for his on-going exploration of beehives and the sun-drenched New Zealand landscape. In contrast, his new series is largely autobiographical and is drawn from memories of growing up in Taranaki in the 60s and 70s. These paintings have a sense of the theatrical and with their dreamscape settings a nocturnal quality, which could be seen as an antithesis to Hight’s earlier beehive works. Both beautiful and curiously haunting, Hight has said of his new collection ‘I am interested in the way objects, places and events reassemble themselves through memory.’ Read more

By The Stream

Antonio Murado 8 Aug - 1 Sep 2012 Auckland City Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Antonio Murado. Murado is an extraordinarily versatile painter with his works ranging from heavily textured impasto dirges to melodious arias, always demonstrating his virtuosity with materials and skill at creating subtle painterly effect. In his new... Read more

The Blue Plateau of Polynesian Memory

John Pule 11 Jul - 4 Aug 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Plateau is an extensive stretch of elevated and comparatively levelled land. It is an environment changed by man-made and natural forces. In this exhibition of new paintings by John Pule, the Plateau is an internal concept. Here it is used here as a metaphor for land altered by memories... Read more

Paris Family Collection - An Introduction

11 Jul - 4 Aug 2012 Auckland City The Wellington home of collectors Les and Milly Paris has literally been filled with art. Works hang cheek by jowl as every possible wall space is utilised. The couple’s passion for art has dominated much of their lives and more than 40 years on, they have one of the most... Read more

Negative Kept

Group Exhibition 13 - 23 Jun 2012 Auckland City The advent of commercially successful photographic processes in the late 1830s profoundly altered the transmission of history. Alongside written and printed word visual imagery became a new vehicle for the documentation and dissemination of information. Negative Kept focuses on a collection of carte-de-visite portraits of Maori from the second part... Read more

Dashper / Reynolds

13 Jun - 7 Jul 2012 Auckland City In 1984 new works by Julian Dashper and John Reynolds were exhibited together at a gallery in Wellington. At the time it was noted that these works were “about living in New Zealand and living in the world at the same time. There is simultaneously order and disorder. Everything is in motion, and to survive change we abstract our experience. We reflect ourselves back on the world according to the abstractions we have made.” (Virginia Were, Art NZ “John Reynolds/Julian Dashper”, Autumn 1985. Number 34. P.17)

Nearly thirty years later this exhibition Dashper / Reynolds brings together works by these artists from this period and contemplates their relationship at a specific point in their careers. The pairing considers the rapport of two diverse artists, both of whom are significant figures in New Zealand art history in their own right, working in common territories. Naturally, over time their careers have diverged and such a pairing of newer work may not be so immediately palpable. Dashper, who passed away in 2009, is widely known for his contribution to abstraction, conceptualism and minimalism while Reynolds more recent works are largely text based such as his 2008 Walters Prize Nomination work Cloud. Read more

Contemporary New Zealand Photography

Group Exhibition 13 Jun - 7 Jul 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery presents two exhibitions to coincide with the Auckland Festival of Photography 2012. Contemporary New Zealand Photography (Lorne St) and Negative Kept (Kitchener St, until 23 June). Contemporary New Zealand Photography is a curated group exhibition of contemporary photographs canvassing a diverse range of subjects and photographic processes. Read more

Karakia

Darryn George 16 May - 9 Jun 2012 Auckland City Although primarily an abstract painter, Darryn George has frequently used letters and numerals in his compositions often offering a more figurative reading than his geometric abstractions may initially suggest. Broadly speaking George’s artistic practice is underpinned by references to his own Christian faith and the series title for these new paintings is Karakia, the Maori word for prayer. It is perhaps not surprising to learn that these works evolved, in part, as a personal response to Christchurch’s deadly earthquake in 2011 which George, a Cantabrian experienced first-hand. Read more

Maukatere

Chris Heaphy 16 May - 9 Jun 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Mind-blowingly complex and impossibly intricate images colonise the paintings in Chris Heaphy’s new exhibition Maukatere. Although each symbol could be interpreted in multifarious ways, the viewer is challenged to consider the sum of their parts in a rich array of colour and densely layered meaning. The eye oscillates between the... Read more

I Can't Stop Loving You

John Walsh 18 Apr - 12 May 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Narrative has always played a strong role in John Walsh’s paintings yet his storytelling has never been prescriptive. In this exhibition of new paintings, it is especially elusive as the suite of landscapes supporting the epic I can’t stop loving you are without his archetypal protagonists. Where earlier series have... Read more

Favourite Things

Group Exhibition 18 Apr - 12 May 2012 Auckland City Despite well written curatorial statements, I sometimes wonder if a curated show is inherently an exhibition of the curator’s favourite things. This exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery Kitchener St is just that. Selected by gallery Staff Favourite Things is a grouping of pairings that, simply put, we like. Read more

Bernar Venet

23 Mar - 14 Apr 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In Nice stands one of France’s tallest public artworks, 9 lignes obliques (2010). More than 30 meters tall, nine vertical steel beams penetrate the coastal city’s skyline. In Austin, Texas, the right angle of an office building is contrasted by the colossal angular red form of 19.5° Angle (1986). At a sculpture park in New York, the singular Cor-ten beam in Straight Line (2000) rises above the treeline and a steel arc appears to precariously balance on the headquarters of Dongkuk Steel Mill Co. in downtown Seoul, South Korea, in 37.5° Arc (2010). Last year, the Cor-ten form of 85.8° Arc x 16 (2011) flanked the entrance to the Château of Versailles and the Palace grounds housed a solo exhibition of six further sculptures. These works - along with several installations around the world, including Japan, Korea, Germany, Norway and now in New Zealand – demonstrate the prominence of French artist Bernar Venet. Read more

Late Models

Ian Scott 23 Mar - 14 Apr 2012 Auckland City A busty topless model stands in front of a seminal American abstract painting and a provocatively dressed blonde fastens her suspenders beside an iconic work of pop art. Scantily clad sex-bombs, masterpieces of modern art and blank white walls. These are the juxtapositions that confront the viewer of Ian Scott's... Read more

Devon is my favorite Luncheon meat

Dale Frank 22 Feb - 17 Mar 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Dale Frank, one of Australia’s most acclaimed Artists, will delight Auckland audiences with an exhibition of recent paintings. His new series of works are as visceral as ever - the result of a highly complex painting technique in which intensely coloured varnish is poured layer upon layer in different stages of the drying process. In the resulting enigmatic and lyrical abstractions, surfaces are laden with colours that collide and separate, literally reacting with each other. Read more

Te Ao Hou

Shane Cotton 22 Feb - 17 Mar 2012 Auckland City Shane Cotton: Te Ao Hou is a thematic survey exhibition focussing on a small grouping of works from the 1990s. The exhibition recognises this period as the era in which Cotton produced some of his finest works, both in their significance to his artistic practice and within the context of New Zealand art history. Read more

Art For New Zealand: Icons of the 1960s and 1970s

Group Exhibition 1 - 18 Feb 2012 Auckland City Reflecting the rapidly developing culture and society, the 1960 and 70s were an expansive time for New Zealand art. The nation received its first television broadcast which, along with greater ease of travel, offered a wider availability of international media. Public museums and galleries were newly developed or modernised and increasingly began to host international touring exhibitions; and dealer galleries were established, creating a new commercial market for patrons. As wider audiences responded to burgeoning opportunities to engage with art, an appetite for visual arts progressively grew. By the 1970s the art world was blossoming. Read more

New Year New Works

Group Exhibition 1 - 18 Feb 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Artists from the Gow Langsford Gallery stable are invited to exhibit new works in New Year New Works - a concept that has become somewhat a tradition of our annual exhibition calendar. Although there is no prescribed theme or curated approach to the exhibition, together these works create a kind of compendium of the current practices of represented artists and by extension contemporary visual arts in Australasia. Read more

John Pule: A Survey 1990 - 2011

14 Dec 2011 - 21 Jan 2012 Auckland City When John Pule first arrived in inner city Auckland as a young adult in 1980, the formal tenets of poetry and painting were largely unknown to him. Over the next 30 years Pule would explore new directions as both writer and painter, and has since emerged as one of this... Read more

Post Pop

Group Exhibition 16 Nov 2011 - 21 Jan 2012 Auckland City Pop Art revolutionized contemporary thinking towards art in the 1950s as aspects of mass culture were elevated to an art world more traditionally occupied by high art subjects and trends. Advertising, comics and mundane subjects of mass culture became the hot topics for artists Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Roy Litchenstein... Read more

Tony Cragg

16 Nov 2011 - 21 Jan 2012 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] British sculptor Tony Cragg is one of the most highly acclaimed and influential sculptors of his generation. Having maintained a consistently high international profile since the 1980s his work has contributed significantly to the discourse around contemporary sculpture. At the centre of his sculptural practice is an interest in the... Read more

Driven to Abstraction

Group Exhibition 21 Oct - 12 Nov 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Driven to Abstraction is a group show of contemporary artists who together represent a diverse range of entry points into abstraction.

Judy Millar’s paintings, based on gesture, lend themselves to elements of both Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction. Millar plays on the notion of gesture in abstraction but adds an ironic twist to the discussion by using screen-printing techniques to generate the final image. Like Millar, Simon Ingram’s non-objective canvases signal more contemporary approaches in his innovative use of modern technologies combined with the hand drawn, in his painting practice. The slug-like painted forms in the two Untitled works appear to devour the formal geometric elements of the painting and one senses that with the passing of time these works will return to the pristine plain white surfaces that existed prior to Ingram making his marks.

Max Gimblett’s large diptych Either/Or from 1983 appears at first glance to be a classic piece of American minimalist painting. However the surface of the work is activated by Gimblett’s masterful use of heavy brushwork to create texture. In the centre of each square a rectangle painted in the same colour and manner as the rest of the painting subtly reveals itself to the viewer. Allen Maddox’s ardent and impassioned paintings established him as one for the most noted Abstract Expressionists New Zealand has produced. Colin McCahon’s Jump painting is indicative of the abstracted landscapes for which is well known.

Although not strictly abstract American Isaac Layman’s photographs offer an alternative perspective on everyday subjects, as the context of his subjects is shifted. By shifting scale and limiting colour creates formal abstract compositions. In Blackout Laymen photographs a blind in a window to produce a work that references the American painter Agnes Martin.

Through myriad approaches, media and materials Driven to Abstraction considers the visual language of abstraction. Read more

Allen Maddox

21 Oct - 12 Nov 2011 Auckland City Allen Maddox's work stands out from that of his peers. Although only in his early fifties at the time of his death in 2000, Maddox remains an important and powerful figure within the history of New Zealand painting. His ardent and impassioned paintings established him as one for the most noted Abstract Expressionists this country has produced.

In his lifetime Maddox produced a comprehensive body of work that is broadly characterised by an uncompromisingly bold and expressive style, and a seemingly obsessive use of the cross and grid motifs. His persistent combination of a formal structural element - the cross and or grid - with free gesture has numerous interpretations, but it is the paradox buried in the relationship between order and expressionism that lends Maddoxs works their seemingly boundless dynamism. Also paramount to Maddox's legacy is the romantic notion of the struggling artist who above everything was dedicated to his artistic practice.

This exhibition brings together a collection of paintings and works on paper that span several decades and different series within his career, some of which will be exhibited for the first time. Read more

Rugby, Rhyming and Here

Dick Frizzell 21 Sep - 15 Oct 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] New work by Dick Frizzell spans both gallery spaces in Rugby, Rhyming and Here. Covering three themes Frizzell's new works are inspired by New Zealand's devotion to Rugby, the poetry of Sam Hunt and our rugged, unique landscape.

Infamous for his eclectic styles, Frizzell has emerged as an icon of New Zealand Visual Culture and his Four Square Man has become a distinct image of Kiwiana itself. Fittingly, Frizzell was selected as the official artist for RWC 2011 and created a series of images that encapsulate our culture and Rugby’s place within it. Along with his limited edition boxed sets and imagery used on official tournament apparel Frizzell has created a suite of paintings around the Rugby idea. Ranging from his infamous 'Tiki' (which courted such controversy when unveiled in the 1990s in the midst of a national debate about biculturalism) to a nostalgic image of half-time oranges for sustenance, bootlaces in the shape of New Zealand and an animated strip of the haka, these works are quintessentially Kiwi and typically Frizzellean.

A second grouping of paintings in Rugby, Rhyming and Here can loosely be called text based works as they take their basis in words by legendary poem Sam Hunt. While some fall within the category of Frizzell’s ‘sign works’ others seem to recall Colin McCahon’s written paintings and drawings of the late 1960s.

The ‘sign’ based works are particularly interesting in relation to the series of more traditional landscapes which make up the third grouping included in Rugby, Rhyming and Here, as the sign works can be understood as an extension of landscape painting. The ‘sign’ series began in the early 2000s as Frizzell, having recently moved from Auckland to the Hawkes Bay, began to treat the signage of his new environment in the same way he would any other object in the landscape. What resulted were groupings of seemingly unrelated slogans and icons together within a single composition, all the yellow signs or all the fruit signs for example, giving the effect of being a single placard. Frizzell affectionately referred to these early sign works as "close up" landscapes so close that "all you can see is the sign on the gate" (Dick Frizzell: The Painter (2009), pg. 243).
The exhibition brings together three distinct elements of New Zealand culture and can be understood as a celebration of all three. Rugby, Rhyming and Here runs across two gallery spaces - at our Lorne St Gallery and our gallery on the corner of Kitchener and Wellesley Sts. Read more

Spring Catalogue 2011

Group Exhibition 31 Aug - 17 Sep 2011 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Spring Catalogue has become an annual tradition at Gow Langsford Gallery. This year the catalogue exhibition boasts a stellar line up of works. Spring Catalogue 2011 brings together significant works from the local secondary market including paintings by Colin McCahon, Don Binney and Ralph Hotere, works by prominent contemporary international artists including Ai Wei Wei, Damien Hirst; shown alongside works from artists in the gallery stable, including Tony Cragg, Bernar Venet, John Pule, Max Gimblett and Judy Millar. Read more

The Dead and the Souls

Damien Hirst 20 Jul - 17 Aug 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Infamous for his wealth, celebrity and his record-breaking, bank-breaking auction prices, Damien Hirst has become somewhat the poster boy for British Art of his era. Rarely shown in this country, Auckland audiences will be treated to an exhibition of his work at Gow Langsford Gallery this winter. Although it may be difficult not to mention money when talking about Hirst, the exhibition The Dead and The Souls brings together a selection of editioned works, as well as some impressive originals, which will appeal to those with pockets shallower than Charles Saatchi's.

The two bodies of editioned work on show, The Dead (2009) and The Souls (2010) envelop several of Hirst's well known concerns; death and life, beauty and desire with a dynamism typical of Hirst's work. The consecutive series are each made up of a few compositions in various colour-ways and each print is in an edition of only fifteen. In The Souls butterflies, as symbols for both the beauty of life and its impermanence, become metaphors for faith and death, while the skull imagery in The Dead make overt reference to mortality. Laid out like museum specimens and more or less anatomically correct Hirst has beautified his subjects through the use of block foil printing. "Of The Souls Hirst has said: I love butterflies because when they are dead they look alive. The foil block makes the butterflies have a feel similar to the actual butterflies in the way that they reflect the light. After The Dead I had to do the butterflies because you can't have one without the other". [Bracewell, M. (2010)]

The mass of imagery and scintillating colour creates spectacle, perhaps inevitable for Hirst, while collectively these works remind us of his power as an image maker and his enduring ability to captivate his audience.

As well as the two collections above we will be showcasing several of Hirst's sculptural Spin Skull works, three butterfly paintings and the impressive original, Beautiful Apollo Idealisation Painting. Read more

Accent

James Cousins 29 Jun - 16 Jul 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] James Cousins is known for his complex paintings which are formed from combined stencils, found imagery and processes extending from a paint, canvas, materiality nexus. Accent presents the second instalment of two shows - the first exhibition was held in Brisbane earlier this year - and further extends upon ideas... Read more

WORD

Group Exhibition 8 - 25 Jun 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] While image-based art is largely interpreted with some ambiguity, text-based works are often understood as direct and clear representations, even explanations of ideas. WORD, an exhibition of text-based works, seeks to illuminate how text can operate as part of a visual language. Although their approaches are multifarious, text is an... Read more

Idlewild

Karl Maughan 18 May - 4 Jun 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Ever faithful to his garden subject Karl Maughan is one of New Zealand’s most recognisable artists. With a career now spanning more than three decades, Maughan’s practice continues to gain momentum and captivate his audiences with his contemporary interpretations of an age-old subject. Despite a dedication to his to subject,... Read more

Radio Painting

Simon Ingram 27 Apr - 14 May 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery presents Radio Painting an exhibition of new paintings by Simon Ingram. As an artist Simon Ingram is known for his collaborations with machines. Unlike most painters, Ingram takes up a position distanced from the direct act of painting and is interested in ideas of self-making painting. Through... Read more

Lucifer: Bring The Light!

Judy Millar 30 Mar - 29 Apr 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In a group of works that include directly painted canvasses, combined paintings and digital prints and oversized silk-screened images, Judy Millar’s exhibition Lucifer: Bring the Light! extends central aspects of her painting practice.

In recent years Millar has used mechanically-generated enlargements of handmade gestures and challenged our expectations of expressive gesture and of the efficacy of painting as a means of communication. In these works Millar both distilled and amplified the act of painting. The works distil the essence of the painterly gesture, exaggerating the dramatic intention and collapsing the activity into a singular moment. The initial act of immediacy of the artist in the studio is simultaneously diluted by its translation into digital image, and exaggerated as gestural marks become oversized and threaten engulf the viewer. They present us with a compression of action that packs the same punch and urgency that we find in the advertisements that surround us. There is a clear desire to grant art the same power as all the other images that press upon us daily.

In Lucifer: Bring the Light! this relationship is compounded further as the highly sophisticated printing technologies works have been replaced by low-fi screen-printing methods. If the origins of some of her gestures was perhaps unclear in earlier works in these works their printed nature is overstated. Millar’s shift from digital to manual printing processes have resulted in cruder printed surfaces which reiterate the translation of the artist’s gestural intervention to a printed, more static image. The outcome leaves the viewer confronted by the question of the authenticity of the final result.
Millar takes up violence as a way to compress time and develop a complex pictoriality. She uses it as an energy source rather than it having any moral implications. Like a fight scene in a comic, pictorial complexity is developed then flattened, presenting all the action on one level in a split second. As Robert Leonhard wrote in 2003, “Millar explores a gamut of possibilities: speed, rhythm and incident; compression and expansion; muscularity and dazzle; not to mention representational associations.” These comments apply more than ever to Millar’s latest body of work.

Judy Millar is one of New Zealand’s most highly regarded and internationally recognised artists. Millar, along with Francis Upritchard represented New Zealand at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and following the success of her exhibition Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, has been invited to exhibit again at the upcoming Venice Biennale. Millar, approached by Dutch curators Karlyn De Jongh & Sarah Gold will create a new work for the exhibition Personal Structures: Time, Space, Existence, a collateral event of the Biennale. The line up of artists is extraordinary and includes revered American minimalist Carl Andre and 'the mother of performance art' Marina Abramovic.

Personal Structures: Time, Space, Existence will be on show at prestigious Venetian place Palazzo Bembo, located on the Grand Canal by the Rialto Bridge. Each artist has been nominated a room within the palace and will be creating new works for the show. Millar's work will integrate with the architectural elements of the space and her 3m meter tall canvas will literally fold out the palace window where it will be seen from the Grand Canal.

This is the first time a New Zealander has been invited to exhibit in this context and affirms Millar's international reputation which continues to gain momentum. In the lead up to this exhibition Millar will also be exhibiting new work in The Ring at Rohkunstbau, Berlin. The Ring is based on Wagner's The Ring of Nibelung and is particularly interesting for Millar, as a New Zealand artist because of its shared relationship to The Lord of the Rings. Read more

Lisa Roet

2 - 26 Mar 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The work of Australian artist Lisa Roet focuses on her interest in the relationship between humans and primates. Although based in Melbourne Roet has spent considerable time observing primate behaviours both in their natural environments and in captivity. Her field observations form the basis of her drawings, bronze sculptures, film and photography and the exhibition Lisa Roet at Gow Langsford Gallery, brings together a collection of bronze works and charcoal drawings.

Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1967, Lisa Roet graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1987. Roet currently lives and works in Melbourne. Over the past ten years, she has also supplemented her studies with residencies at ape research centres and major international zoos in Berlin and Atlanta, as well as field observation of apes in the forests of Borneo, Malaysia.

Since her first show at Querhause Gallery, Berlin in 1992, Roet has held more than twenty-five solo exhibitions around the world. Particularly acclaimed are Aping, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne and The Depot Gallery, Sydney (2008); Simian Line, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne (2006); Lisa Roet: Finger of Suspicion, McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, Melbourne (2004); Pri-Mates, Lawrence Wilson Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth (2004); Pri-Mates Drawing, Melbourne Museum, Melbourne (2003); The Shadow, National Gallery of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2001); Pri-Mates: Hands, LiebmanMagnan Gallery, New York (2000-2001); and Sebrechts-Park, Brugge Kunst Halle, Brussels.

She has also participated in more than fifty group exhibitions including Den Hagg Sculptuur 2007/The Hague Sculpture 2007, The Hague, the Netherlands (2007); Satellite Project (12 Australian Artists), Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China (2006); McClelland Sculpture Survey & Award, McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park (2005 and 2003); Kiss of the Beast, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2005); Instinct, Monash University Museum of Art, Monash University, Melbourne (2004); Nature Machine Exhibition, Queensland Gallery of Art, Brisbane (2004);Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, Werribee Park, Victoria (2003); National Works on Paper Award, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria (2003); National Sculpture Prize, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2003); and Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2001).

Her various awards and achievements include the prestigious McClelland Sculpture Survey & Award (2005); The Kedumba Drawing Award (2005); the National Works on Paper Award (2003); and the National Sculpture Prize (2003). She has also been the recipient of several important grants, including an Asia Link Residency at the National Gallery of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2000).

Roet has featured in the Australian Art Collector's "Most Collectible Artists" (2001& 2007) and is the subject of an impressive monograph by Alexie Glass, Lisa Roet: Uncommon Observations, Thames & Hudson, Sydney, 2005.

Further reading on Lisa Roet's work:
A Clown and His Chimp by Ashley Crawford in Australian Art Collector (Issue 44, 2008).

Reviews
Listen to Kim Hill and Mary Kissler talk about Lisa Roet's exhibition during White Night. Radio NZ 26.03.2011 Read more

The Daring Young Man on The Flying Trapeze

Max Gimblett 2 - 26 Feb 2011 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Daring Young Man on The Flying Trapeze is a collection of new works by visionary painter Max Gimblett. For Gimblett, the notion of time is circular and, fittingly, his recent paintings emanate a youthfulness that belies his seventy-five years. Although continuing with elements that have defined his practice over the past five decades, in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze his works are particularly celebratory. Flamboyant colours are fused with his often reticent surfaces and geometric patterns sit alongside his vivacious brushwork. Read more

Colour Codes

Sara Hughes 3 - 27 Nov 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Sara Hughes exhibition Colour codes brings together a series of new paintings and works on paper that continue her exploration of colour relationships in her distinctively hypnotic compositions of colour and form. Drawn from her in depth analysis of the colour content of websites, Colour codes focuses particularly on the way in which colour is used by financial institutions online and extends Hughes ongoing interest in global systems of information exchange. Read more

Bird's Eye View

Paul Dibble 8 - 30 Oct 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Native birds hold particular resonance in New Zealand culture and have emerged as somewhat emblematic of its national identity. Once revered by Maori, their metaphorical significance is remembered in local legends, while contemporary bird imagery commonly represents the country's unique wildlife and natural environment. Fittingly, it is a subject frequently... Read more

Spring Catalogue 2010

Group Exhibition 8 Sep - 2 Oct 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Spring Catalogue Exhibition is a highlight of the John Leech and Gow Langsford Galleries' exhibition schedules and an annual tradition that began in 1996. Including a range of local and international investment artworks the exhibition brings together a collection of historical artefacts, contemporary painting and sculpture, many of which are of museum quality. Read more

Recent Paintings

Dale Frank 11 Aug - 3 Sep 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Complex galaxies of brilliant colour react into each other in Dale Frank's enigmatic abstractions. Laden surfaces reveal the expressive potential of paint but the fluid and lyrical nature of his canvases belie the calculated science of his painting practice. Read more

The Gloves Are Off

Dick Frizzell 28 Jul - 7 Aug 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Inspired by shop front signs and placards The Gloves Are Off brings together a series of typically Frizzellean sign paintings. Read more

New Traditions: Recurring Themes in Maori Art

14 - 24 Jul 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] New Traditions brings together contemporary paintings, folk art and traditional Maori art forms to explore three different eras of New Zealands art history. The pairing of works highlights the ongoing significance and contemporary relevance of themes pertinent to traditional Maori art practices. Pre-colonial Maori artisans were constantly finding innovative solutions... Read more

Cultural Nature

Gregor Kregar 16 Jun - 10 Jul 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Cultural Nature, Gregor Kregar's inaugural solo exhibition with Gow Langsford Gallery features an immersive environment of gleaming metallic sculpture and glazed stoneware ceramics. Disrupting the conventional gallery space, abstract sculptures hang from the ceiling and seemingly grow from the walls. Several of the structures are highly reflective and mirror the viewer and surrounding space in refracted shards. An integral component of Kregar's practice to date has been the interactive element of much of his work. For this exhibition, in addition to reflective materials such as stainless steel, Kregar has been working with new substances such as chameleon paint. This relies on the viewer's movement around the work to reveal the paint's multi-coloured properties and the theretofore hidden variability of the work.

The distinctive form of Kregar's aluminium and stainless steel works is key to many of the concerns explored within his wider practice. The pieces embody the contradictions of nature versus culture, and the mathematical versus a more intuitive artistic process. Comprised of a number of smaller geometrical units, the works appear self-determining, growing like crystalline formations. Their structure echoes some of our world's more elemental building blocks - of molecules, of DNA. Developed from small cardboard models, Kregar also refers to his large, full size works as models. Inherent in this reference is a realm of possibility, stemming from the artist's interest in Constructivism and utopian architecture, and the different ways in which sculpture can operate. Read more

3 x 1: A Series of Photographic Exhibitions

25 May - 12 Jun 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery presents 3 x 1 a series of photography exhibitions. Throughout the series photographers Bruce Jarvis, Simon Devitt and Patrick Reynolds will each exhibit week long exhibitions. The series begins with Rock Legends (25 - 29 May) a series of works by photographer Bruce Jarvis. The series includes... Read more

Rarohiko

Darryn George 28 Apr - 22 May 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langford Gallery presents Rarohiko an exhibition of new paintings by Darryn George. The exhibition brings together two bodies of works, Rarohiko and Countdown, and coincides with the launch of the artist's first monograph Darryn George. Read more

Thomas Ruff: Photographs

26 Mar - 24 Apr 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of photographs by Thomas Ruff.

Thomas Ruff is a celebrated German artist, internationally renowned for his conceptual photographic series. Since the 1980s his work has explored many fields of contemporary life. His first solo exhibition in New Zealand, Thomas Ruff: Photographs includes pieces from four major bodies of work: nudes, portraits, architecture and constellations. Read more

Dear Beauty, Dear Beast

Reuben Paterson 24 Feb - 20 Mar 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In colours commissioned especially from the glitter manufacturer Dear Beauty, Dear Beast, is a handsome show of new paintings by Reuben Paterson. The series began for Paterson as a reaction to New Zealand's provocation debate. In the way that previous bodies of work have honoured his whakapapa and found basis... Read more

New Works

David McCracken 20 Jan - 20 Feb 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Working from his rail side studio in a converted factory in Parnell, Auckland, David McCracken has created a series of dexterous and minimal works for his first solo show with Gow Langsford Gallery.

Through a combination of processes including hydrostatic pressure McCracken toys with our perception of material forms. His works often appear to transcend their physicality - dense works appear light, solid works appear malleable, impenetrable surfaces appear pliable.

Like inflated toys or helium balloons, his spherical and tear shaped works in New Works appear weightless although they are constructed from dense materials. In two large works McCracken emulates tread plate, a typically light weight metal stock with a regular pattern of raised diamonds. Here panels in the style of tread plate are welded in dense Corten steel, again suggesting a defiance of the traditional elements of his materials.

When exposed to elements the surface of Corten steel develops a stable rust-like appearance. In comparison other works which have highly polished and reflected surfaces, some pieces in New Works have been rain washed adding a painterly quality to the surface to the works.

The relationship between an austere physical presence and more sensuous aesthetic qualities gives McCracken’s sculptures their conceptual efficacy; and refined compositions their striking elegance. Read more

TAG

James Cousins & Simon Ingram 9 - 23 Jan 2010 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] TAG is the first exhibition in the INITIATIVE series, a program established to offer gallery artists an opportunity to exhibit more experimental or project based works and to add diversity to the gallery exhibition schedule.

In TAG painters Simon Ingram and James Cousins present an exhibition of new paintings that sit outside their regular exhibiting practice. As the title suggests their joint exhibition promotes an exchange of ideas and provides a new context in which to consider their works. Read more

New Works

Judy Millar 11 Nov - 5 Dec 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Developed alongside her work currently on show in the New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Biennale the new work in this exhibition extends Judy Millar’s tireless interrogation of the possibilities inherent in the immediacy of painting as an activity and an act of communication in today’s world. Millar will present... Read more

Spring Catalogue 2009

Group Exhibition 14 Oct - 7 Nov 2009 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Spring Catalogue Exhibition has been a hallmark of the Gow Langsford Gallery calendar since 1996. Presented in conjunction with John Leech Gallery, the exhibition is made up of a collection of investment artworks ranging from historical paintings by artists including Alfred Sharpe and Nicholas Chevalier to works by renowned artists such as Rosalie Gascoigne and Colin McCahon. For the first time, Gow Langsford and John Leech Galleries have invited artists from their stables of artists to create new works specifically for the show, adding a contemporary edge to this years’ collection. Read more

Black to Black

Group Exhibition 16 Sep - 8 Oct 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of three of New Zealand’s most significant contemporary painters: Darryn George, Shane Cotton and Ralph Hotere. The artists are linked by the conceptual concerns explored within their works – which often attempt to reconcile a Maori and European heritage: both... Read more

Sold Out: Works from the 1990s

Peter Robinson 19 Aug - 12 Sep 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Often bitterly ironic or aggressively humorous Peter Robinson’s works of the 1990s have emerged as iconic in contemporary New Zealand art. Around this time questions regarding the efficacy of centralised policy for biculturalism flourished in New Zealand and fittingly Robinson’s works of this period address interracial politics and the commercial consumerism of cultural identity. Read more

Nothing Must Remain

John Pule 22 Jul - 15 Aug 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] John Pule's exhibition Nothing Must Remain is a detailed and emotive look at love and the human view of, and impact on, the ocean. Twenty small works on paper are hand written love poems that speak of angels and show Pule's artistic talent at its best. The artist's familiar mix of text and image show a new direction by the use of bright watercolours and the uncluttered pages possess a delicate complexity. Read more

Every Day is like Sunday

Karl Maughan 23 Jun - 17 Jul 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery presents Every Day is like Sunday, a solo show by Karl Maughan featuring his iconic garden scenes.

Karl Maughan’s perfectly executed gardens are iconic in contemporary New Zealand art. In his new exhibition Every Day is like Sunday the famous rhododendrons are taking a secondary space to the lush foliage and coloured petals of a variety of flower species and for the first time, Maughan has incorporated coastal gardens into his compositions. Read more

International Photography

Group Exhibition 2 - 19 Jun 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery presents International Photography, a stellar collection of photographic works from around the world.

The photographic medium is one of the most accessible artistic pursuits and the internationally acclaimed artists in International Photography present us with an engaging variety of different worlds.

Kim Joon’s famous painted nudes confidently claim their role as interrogator of reality and illusion while the emotionless portraits from Roland Fischer’s “Los Angeles Series” are eerily beautiful. Australian photographer Rebecca Hobbs’ focus here is on the animal world and our connection with it. The scenes she portrays are disconnected from the world they inhabit by the use of a pitch black backgrounds acting as a stage curtain behind the scene.

Anthony Goicolea employs the black and white photographic technique to discuss the ideas of human control and destruction. His images comment on power in the present and future and the destructive forces of both humanity and nature. Danwen Xing’s “DisCONNECTION” works examine e-trash as objects of 21st century modernity and Patricia Piccinini’s photographs seek to redefine the dualism of the artificial and the natural.

Each of the artists presented in International Photography have their own unique view of the world that they eloquently display in their work. The preview is timed to coincide with Gravity Festival Tuesday on Tuesday 2nd June. Read more

Full Fathom Five

Max Gimblett 5 - 29 May 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Max Gimblett is one of few New Zealander's to exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City. His recent inclusion in The Third Mind is milestone in recent New Zealand art history is directly followed by his exhibition full fathom five at Gow Langsford Gallery. The exhibition presents a collection of new paintings in his signature style of luscious surfaces, shaped canvases and fluid brushwork. Read more

Refractions

Tim Maguire 7 Apr - 1 May 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Tim Maguire based originally in Australia and more recently in Europe, started painting in the 1980s. It was during the 1990s however that he first developed the flower paintings for which he is perhaps most well-known. These works, depicting individual flowers magnified to the extreme or vast cinematic flower-scapes, are... Read more

Signal

James Cousins 10 Mar - 3 Apr 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In his inaugural show with Gow Langsford, James Cousins presents a body of painting that both draws from and expands on concepts explored in his earlier practice. Aligned with his early grid-based and recurring image works of the 1990s, Cousins recent work employs wellworn distant utopian landscape imagery, informed by... Read more

Boing, Boom, Tschak

Simon Ingram 3 - 25 Feb 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] In Boing, Boom, Tschak, Simon Ingram draws together two parallel lines of inquiry, the resulting works exhibit an intriguing painterly dialogue. The exhibition includes paintings that the artist has created by hand according to simple sets of machine like rules i.e. the ‘artist as machine’. Juxtaposed alongside these are self-making painting machines, developed and constructed by Ingram i.e. the ‘machine as artist’. Both procedures generate exquisite painterly monochromatic compositions, whether machine or man-made. The focus is on a dialogue of mechanistic and automatic practices embedded in the gritty material fact of painting. Though the works have roots in Concrete Art and Abstraction, they open up a conversation with artificial life and the idea that matter, the matter of painting, develops its own vocabularies of thought and self-organisation. Ingram’s work also draws on the history of the machine in art as an apparatus of autonomous creativity and in so doing calls into question the traditional assumption of the artist as creative genius. In Boing, Boom, Tschak, Ingram does so with vigour, subtle irony and compassion.

Simon Ingram's work interprets the modernist practice of the autonomous, self-made artwork in relation to painting as a constructional and computationally based self-organising system. His practice articulates itself in three distinct lines of work: machines made from Lego robotics and generic constructional materials that paint autonomously in oil paint with a brush; paintings made by the artist that use artificial life systems as a method to govern composition and decision making; and video work related to the production of self-making painting machines. Drawing on divergent strands of knowledge (artificial life, painting, critical theory, software), the project re-stages and reinvents painting as a critical, contemporary project that explores painting’s conceptual signification while remaining resolutely fabricational. Read more

Clock The Ton

Group Exhibition 9 - 30 Jan 2009 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery presents Clock the Ton, a collection of new and existing works by selected gallery artists including; John Pule, Shane Cotton, Judy Millar, Sara Hughes, James Cousins, Tim Maguire, Allen Maddox, Richard McWhannell, Darryn George, Antonio Murado, Martin Ball, Simon Ingram and Reuben Paterson. Each of the 100 artworks exhibited are less than 600mm squared allowing for a variety of media and styles to interface upon the gallery walls.

Small artworks side step a number of art historical traditions: the significance of physicality in Modernist movements and the Post Modern preoccupation with the spectacle via the proliferation of installation, film and public art. In contrast these comparatively miniature artworks can express the essential without the influence of size or grand gesture, their limited dimensions embodying the monumental and often seminal. Read more

Walking Back To Happiness

Dick Frizzell 11 Nov - 5 Dec 2008 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Dick Frizzell’s 2008 exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery returns to the interests of the artist’s self-proclaimed ‘misspent comic-book youth’. Entranced at an early age by comics, Frizzell remarks that it was this source material that originally taught him to draw. As a boy he would spend hours copying from his favourite comic artists. He was drawn particularly to the sharp, graphic, gritty style of several American comics like Batman, superior in the artist’s mind to the heavily illustrated and ‘prissy’ comics such as The Eagle. Above all others however, it was Lee Falk’s 1936 creation: The Phantom, which for Frizzell, encapsulated all that a comic should be (replete with hairy-knuckled baddies). Read more

Dale Frank

14 Oct - 7 Nov 2008 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Australian artist Dale Frank. Frank, who first exhibited in New Zealand in 1997, has an international career that has spanned more than 20 years. The breadth of his practice was recently showcased in an extensive monograph... Read more

Spring Catalogue 2008

Gow Langsford and John Leech Galleries 19 Sep - 10 Oct 2008 Auckland City, Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] The Gow Langsford Gallery tradition of the Spring Catalogue is well established. This year, along with significant contemporary and historical works by New Zealand artists, contemporary works from Asia are included. The cover features Feng Zhengjie’s China No. 21 and works by Kim Joon and Shen Qi are also featured. Read more

Nicky Hoberman

26 Aug - 12 Sep 2008 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] During the mid 1990s advertising magnate and contemporary art collector Charles Saatchi announced the new wave in contemporary art with an exhibition and publication entitled The New Neurotic Realists. This new school signalled the return to traditional materials and created a context for contemporary figurative painters; namely Marlene Dumas, Peter... Read more

Sea of Tranquility

Chris Heaphy 29 Jul - 22 Aug 2008 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Exhibiting his first solo show at Gow Langsford since joining the gallery in 2007, Chris Heaphy has produced a bold series of works which will challenge viewers to consider the sum of their parts through a rich cornucopia of colour and pop imagery. Chris Heaphy’s broad appeal derives in part... Read more

Scales of Economy

Sara Hughes 1 - 25 Jul 2008 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Having just returned to New Zealand after a year in the United States undertaking two international art residencies, Sara Hughes returns to Gow Langsford Gallery to exhibit new paintings in Scales of Economy. The works in this exhibition explore the artist’s interest in patterns of behaviour and configurations of consumerism.... Read more

Paradise

Paul Dibble 3 - 27 Jun 2008 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Over the past two decades Paul Dibble has emerged as a significant figure in contemporary New Zealand sculpture. His bronze works are eagerly sought after locally and with his successful commission of the New Zealand Hyde Park Corner Memorial in London (2006), Dibble has gained an increasingly strong international following.... Read more

Gow Langsford Gallery Lorne Street Opening

Group Exhibition 26 - 31 May 2008 Lorne Street [2008 - 2021] Gow Langsford Gallery opened the doors of its new gallery premises at 26 Lorne St, Auckland on 20 May 2008, with a group exhibition; the highlight of which is a work by infamous UK artist, Damien Hirst. The work entitled Sacred XIV (2005) consists of a dagger piercing a pig’s heart and suspended in a tank of formaldehyde. Read more

Scout 2008

Tim Hawkinson 8 Apr - 16 May 2008 Auckland City Tim Hawkinson's work defies easy categorisation. Ranging from drawings and paintings to multi-media constructions, his pieces can incorporate sound, kinetic elements and computer programming. Though meticulously designed and delicately constructed, such works have a definite air of DIY technology: like a science project gone horribly wrong, or fantastically right. Unlike many contemporary practitioners who outsource production, Hawkinson usually constructs even the most labour-intensive of his projects. He integrates scavenged and ephemeral materials and is most well known for the bizarre results that this mix of elements produce. Read more

Pukapuka

Darryn George 4 - 28 Mar 2008 Auckland City Gow Langsford gallery is pleased to present the first solo show of its 2008 calendar with new works by Christchurch-based painter Darryn George. The occasion also marks George’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery having joined Gow Langsford recently in 2007.

Entitled Pukapuka this collection of paintings operates on numerous levels. George’s geometric forms may be read as book shelves, a collection of books or a library of sorts - the word ‘pukapuka’ being the Maori transliteration of ‘book’. Within these arrangements a basic assortment of symbols and iconography is interspersed- fragments of maps and bridges are enlisted as metaphors to encompass the notion of ‘salvation’. Within this context the idea of a ‘book of salvation’ naturally generates associations with the bible and by extension Christian theology. Whilst references to the Old and New Testament may be insinuated, George’s paintings are not bound by them, offering the viewer freedom to explore alternate possibilities. On another level, George fuses the traditions of customary Maori art forms with Western abstraction extending the dialogue first established by Gordon Walters in an innovative and thoroughly engaging way. The artist employs generic kowhaiwhai and moko motifs to enrich the layers beneath broad bands of colour. These customary curvilinear designs functioned as an expression of one’s whakapapa. In George’s paintings they become the foundation upon which he composes his own geometric interpretations motivated by the rhythms and cadences evident in traditional designs. In many cases George experiments with the axial orientation of kowhaiwhai so that text, letters or motif combinations are flipped, rotated and reflected. While these paintings acknowledge a formalist aesthetic, on close inspection they reveal surprisingly rich texture. Alternate bands of colour are often realised with a controlled application of thick impasto leaving three dimensional impressions that emulate the chisel ridges formed in Maori wood carving. Many of the patterns chosen by the artist signify ‘mana’ a concept which denotes characteristics such as power, strength and prestige. One particular recurring kowhaiwhai motif employed by George is the ‘Mangotipi’- a design influenced by a creature of formidable strength and resilience- the great white shark. George’s paintings represent a thoughtful consideration and consolidation of diverse cultural, artistic and theological dialogue. Read more

Pink and White Terraces

Nova Paul 19 - 29 Feb 2008 Auckland City Pink and White Terraces is a 16 mm film that reflects on the delicate construction of the domestic environments and public places in the cityscape of Auckland, New Zealand. Using an optical process technique 'three-colour separation', the film makes visual several moments simultaneously. In red, green and blue layers, colour-coded auras hold a record of time like a geological accretion. In and out of phase, actors and environment focus and fade, making palpable filmic time, and gently unfolding the politics and poetics of the sites explored.

The film is comprised of a series of static shots where the same place or action has been recorded three times, making tangible that no location is fixed, people move through space, and qualities of light and weather change. From barren trees in winter afternoon light through to a hot summer day on a front porch with friends, washing dishes at night or getting dressed to go out, shopping at a busy Sunday market to popping in to the dairy. The soundtrack by Rachel Shearer uses atmospheric sound recorded during the shoot mixed with a palette of sounds derived from the colour presence on screen, a union of the abstract and the figurative. Pink and White Terraces traces little happenings, things we do without acknowledging them as 'significant', but which collectively speak clearly about who we are individually and collectively. Read more

For The Love of God, Laugh and Dollar Sign

Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol 5 - 15 Feb 2008 Auckland City For the Love of God is possibly the most famous artwork produced in recent decades and is the latest feat of super-artist / necromancer Damien Hirst. The title inspired by his mother’s question “for the love of God what are you going to do next?”, more than 8,500 flawless diamonds... Read more

The Sixties: High Tide and Green Grass

Frank Habicht 30 May - 27 Jun 2007 Auckland City To coincide with the Auckland Festival of Photography 2007 held from 1- 24 June, Gow Langsford Gallery displayed a selection of photographs from German photographer Frank Habicht. Now a resident in New Zealand, Habicht travelled extensively over the years working between London, Paris and Berlin. He has worked as a... Read more

In Fluorescents

Group Exhibition 2 - 26 May 2007 Auckland City Gow Langsford Galley is proud to present In Fluorescents: a group show exploring flora and fluoro in the work of five contemporary artists from New Zealand, Australia and the U.S.A. Artists include: Tim Maguire, Sara Hughes, Karl Maughan, Reuben Paterson and Jeff Koons. Selected on the basis of their iconic... Read more

Heavyweights

Sculpture from the UK 4 - 28 Apr 2007 Auckland City Celebrated British sculptors, Barry Flanagan (b.1941, Wales) and Tony Cragg (b.1949, Liverpool) feature in Gow Langsford Gallery's upcoming exhibition, Heavyweights - Sculpture from the UK . As two of the most important representatives of Contemporary British Art to emerge of their generation, remarkably, it is the first time that Flanagan's... Read more

Butter For The Fish

Judy Millar 6 - 31 Mar 2007 Auckland City Judy Millar’s current exhibition Keeping You, You, Keeping me, Me at Lopdell House Gallery gives us a teaser as to what to expect from her new work due to open at Gow Langsford Gallery on March 6. Her show Butter for the Fish will present work developed during her recent... Read more

Contemporary Artists From China

Group Exhibition 8 Feb - 3 Mar 2007 Auckland City In celebration of Chinese New Year 2007, Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present Contemporary Artists from China. The exhibition will draw together works by eight mainland Chinese visual artists in an engaging display of painting, sculpture, photography and performance art. Seven of the eight artists demonstrate the diversity and... Read more

Recent Painting

Brad Lochore 10 Feb - 8 Mar 2004 UK based painter Brad Lochore left New Zealand in 1977 and has been in London since where he has steadily gained a reputation as one of the hottest young painters in Britain today. His exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery from 10th February will be his first solo exhibition in his... Read more

Outback: Australian Aboriginal Masterpieces

Group Exhibition 13 Jan - 7 Feb 2004 Auckland City The painting of Australia’s native Aboriginal’s has long been of interest to art historians, anthropologists and art collectors. While many aboriginal works are somewhat formulaic with designs and motifs being passed down from one generation to the next, from 13 January, Gow Langsford Gallery – Auckland will exhibit major works... Read more

2003 Exhibition History Overview

1 Jan - 31 Dec 2003 Auckland City This listing of past exhibitions and events was collated from a variety of sources in 2012. Some of the earlier records are incomplete so have been listed as accurately as possible. 14 January – 8 February 2003 Patricia Piccinini, Anthony Goicolea Gow Langsford Gallery, Kitchener St 15 January – 11... Read more

2002-2004 Gow Langsford Gallery Sydney

Exhibition History Overview 1 Mar 2002 - 14 Oct 2004 Offsite In March 2002, Gow Langsford Gallery opened at the Danks St Gallery Centre in Sydney, Australia. The gallery exhibited both New Zealand and Australian artists along with international artists including Spencer Tunick and Danwen Xing. The gallery hosted monthly exhibitions until the end of 2004. Exhibition overview: Opening Exhibition :... Read more