There is something of the alchemist about Greer Twiss, as he pours, bends and fashions the basest of materials into some of our most precious
works of contemporary art.
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
Our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home
Orexart is privileged to re-present a selection of some of the extraordinary and powerful work Philippa Blair produced during the late nineties and early noughties in the studio she made with husband John Porter, in Venice California.
A spin-off exhibition based on our presentation at Aoteaora Art Fair in April
Visit us a Booth G08 at the Aoteaora Art Fair Viaduct Events Centre
Mikhail Gherman is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Karen Walker. The Captains Series is his first gallery exhibition, and offers up a collision of some of Gherman’s perennial obsessions: outsiders; junkshop art genres; solitary men; and a news cycle bursting with violence.
Some small but perfectly formed works from our artists’ studios and archives
Our summer hang features key works by some of our represented artists
Tony Lane's paintings resist casual interpretation. The work is complex, the symbols elusive. All paintings are abstract, even representational ones. The elements of a painting are symbolic, a kind of shorthand, for the artist’s concerns.
Philippa Blair is an architect, surveyor, scientist, sculptor, dancer, horse rider, musician, linguist, teacher, mother; in truth she is an artist who brings all the attributes of the former to the table of the latter. Moreover, she is fearless, always has been, still is, her life is tied to her art.
The paintings of Kathy Barber are derived from a montage of memories just out of reach, swirled together as a type of utopian landscape. The large sweeping gestures she has affectionately coined as ‘sidewinders’ help flood all the works with a light reminiscent of Turner.
Encompassing images from around Whangarei and the Kaipara as well as Westland in the South Island artist and mathematician Peter James Smith is always inventive, always discovering, and here presents us with some of the largest single piece canvases he has ever completed.
Through a collection of intuitive landscape paintings on heavy canvas Dr Leonie Ngahuia Mansbridge explores her connection to whenua as intertwined with her own whakapapa.
Jacqui Colley’s artworks are dynamic acts of painting and remembering. Each one is a visual statement within which are embedded moments of deliberation and serendipity, a fitting together of thoughts, actions, and reactions to the physical immediacy of making.
Prakash Patel describes himself as feeling out of place – everywhere. At first glance, his paintings appear deeply and consciously steeped in his Indian heritage, with their repeating patterns and motifs and the bright, iridescent colours. On closer inspection, they offer something more universal.
TRANSITION is an exhibition of powerful, tondo-shaped works. Dynamic and enigmatic, these paintings pulsate with an energy that is unique to Wolfgramm’s practice.
Growing up in the Past is an exploration of the artist’s childhood experiences, both real and imaginary, in Banks Peninsula.
Dagmar Dyck's work is inspired by her cultural heritage and explore textile practices of Tonga including bark cloth mats, baskets and clothing. In this exhibition, falanoa, Dagmar examines the construction methods used in the Tongan feminine art forms, called koloa. She translates some of this ancestral knowledge into contemporary art forms and colours using the medium of painting and weaving to voice her own story of ‘being Tongan’ in Aotearoa. The title itself, devised by the artist, draws together the concept of talanoa (storytelling) with fala (woven textiles).
15 November – 10 December 2022
Memories, and the experiences that trigger them, provide the backdrop for Martin Ball’s new paintings. As a youth growing up in West Auckland in the 1960s he was familiar with the tracks, and the waterfalls and streams in the Waitakere Ranges. In those formative years his interest in painting such scenes was informed by artists such as Petrus van der Velden and Diego Velazquez. Over fifty years later he has revisited the images.
25 October – 12 November 2022
Goat Island or Te Hawere-a-Maki, the marine reserve, is close to Richard’s studio. Are these a painterly response? Perhaps it is as the painter Brett Whitely said, “I’m not going to talk to you about my paintings, just look at them if you want to know about them”. Orexart is very pleased to show these new paintings by Richard Adams.
Take your time to ‘know about them’.
8 – 22 October 2022
The perfect antidote for these times, Murphy’s drawings are exquisitely drawn in pencil as to be almost photographic. Her reimagined adverts play with notions of domestic bliss enhanced by the candy-floss clouds of new products. But there is ambiguity: Are they to be read as symbolically or literally present?
6 September – 1 October 2022
Lane’s visual language is deeply connected to painting’s history, from thirteenth century Italian painters such as Giotto to the Spanish still-life painters of the seventeenth century and through to his New Zealand upbringing and exposure to New Zealand as a place that would imprint its landforms into his psyche.
12 August – 3 September
Over some 30 years of exhibiting, Wes Fieldhouse has presented everything from photorealism and romantic landscapes through to highly provisional abstraction. True to form, this exhibition marks another stylistic shift.
28 June – 23 July
This series of paintings by Philippa Blair is a record of the thoughts, feelings, and events that motivated, inspired, and, at times, horrified her over the past 18 months.
11 May – 4 June
The landscape is one of New Zealand’s most beloved, and enduring subjects, with generations of artists helping us to interpret and understand our environment, celebrating both the prosaic and the sublime. Among them are Richard McWhannell, Tony Lane, Martin Ball, Peter James Smith and John Madden, and we are very pleased to present a few of their recent paintings.
9 April – 7 May
Siân Torrington’s organic, playful and vaguely disturbing three dimensional works quite literally thread together everyday materials, found objects, scraps, fabric to create highly tactile and colourful assemblages. Her paintings, more like drawings on a collision course with colour and dimension, are equally bold, colourful and full of energy.
12 March – 2 April 2022
This spirited body of work is more than 40 years in the making. Renown painter Richard McWhannell turns his attention to his first love: motor racing.
8 February – 6 March 2022
After several covid-related delays, we are delighted to finally present a solo exhibition by Jacqui Colley, whose paintings and drawings we have long admired. The deep connection to drawing is clear in each and every one of the paintings that make up this extraordinary new collection.
