CURATED BY —
LUCY KENNEDY
Aotearoa Art Fair
30 April – 3 May
The Aotearoa Art Fair is back, and bigger than ever.
With 60 galleries representing more than 200 artists, it’s the perfect place to explore and collect the best of contemporary art of Aotearoa and beyond. The 2025 edition welcomed more than 11,000 visitors, the highest attendance in the fair’s 21-year history. This year’s event will expand across all three levels of the Viaduct Events Centre for the first time, enabling a broader programme and more galleries. Set against Auckland’s waterfront, the fair continues to strengthen its position as New Zealand’s premier contemporary art event. The lineup reflects the diversity of contemporary art practice across Aotearoa and the wider region, offering a snapshot of the current art landscape.
Viaduct Event Centre
artfair.co.nz
BERGMAN GALLERY
Evocations
Luise Fong and Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka
11 April – 2 May
Evocations brings together Luise Fong and Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka, two of Aotearoa’s most compelling abstract practitioners. Fong’s practice has evolved over decades around rich painterly surfaces and lyrical abstraction, balancing gestural form with the tracing of memory and perception. Maka’s recent canvases employ elemental processes to evoke complex histories and ancestral presence. The new works of Fong and Maka enter a productive dialogue across abstraction, surface and cultural resonance, emphasising how contemporary abstraction can embody lived experience and ancestral connection.
3/582 Karangahape Road
bergmangallery.com
MELANIE ROGER GALLERY
Veriditas
Rosa Allison
8 April – 2 May
Reflecting on her Christian upbringing, Rosa Allison questions inherited structures that place humans and the Christian God above the natural world, leading to a culture of dominance and exploitation of the whenua. Bodies merge and dissolve into one another, moving between abstraction and figuration. Green becomes the dominant colour, ranging from fresh sapling tones to dark, swampy hues, suggesting different states of life and growth. Veriditas proposes a re-enchanted ecology, honouring nature as alive and sacred.
444 Karangahape Road
melanierogergallery.com
STUDIO ONE – TOI TŪ
Failures Teach us More than Success
Group Show
16 April – 14 May
Mark Alister Raymer and James S Watson have collaborated to bring this less-than-pristine pile of prints to Studio One Toi Tū’s walls in the hope of developing connections, driving discussions, and pondering the perplexity of printmaking. They asked printmakers from across the world to send in prints that were less than their best, or what could be called failures. What is presented is the entirety of those submissions, the only criterion was the willingness and bravery to submit.
1 Ponsonby Road, Auckland
studioone.org.nz
