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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sculpture for Strange Times

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

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

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

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

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

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