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

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

Ceci N'est Pas 1921

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alpha Paradise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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