Latest Events in Auckland(April Updated)

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Safety in Numbers: Colin McCahon’s Dark Equations draws from Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s extensive holdings to explore a selection of the artist’s mysterious number paintings made between 1975 and 1976. Numbers first surfaced in McCahon’s work in the late 1950s and would become the primary subject of his art by the mid-1970s in the Teaching aids, Clouds, Noughts and crosses, and Rocks in the sky series. Within these works, Arabic and Roman numerals hover in darkness, appear at once tabulated and like geological strata, or recall complex mathematical equations on a school blackboard. The number paintings also refer to The Stations of the Cross, and communicate themes of life and death, as well as redemption and salvation. Safety in Numbers presents a puzzling yet visually unified chapter of the artist’s practice. While the stark block printing may appear straightforward, the works provide a profound reflection on art’s ability to communicate existential concerns, drawing viewers into a dialogue with McCahon’s coded symbolism. Beyond this, the exhibition also prompts a questioning of art’s role as a space for teaching and learning, and the challenges that come with interpretation.

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Jenny Holzer’s text works, called Truisms, were first executed as pithy and sometimes provocative slogans on the streets of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s as stickers, t-shirts and posters, with the intention of taking art out of the museum and into public life. Holzer quickly converted these statements to the media of advertising and public communication with a series of pivotal LED signs, most famously in New York’s Times Square. Holzer’s use of electronic technology is, she says, motivated by ‘needing to be where people look’. Hanging suspended from the ceiling of the Gallery’s South Atrium, in STATEMENT – Truisms +, 2015 iconic statements like ‘ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE’ and ‘ENSURE THAT YOUR LIFE STAYS IN FLUX’ cascade and flash in speech-like pulsating rhythms and rainbow spectrums of colour, seemingly with a life of their own.

Taimoana | Coastlines explores the art of Aotearoa New Zealand, locating it within Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the wider Pacific region. Taking the concept of the coast, or shoreline, as a starting point, the exhibition navigates a sea of ideas, offering multiple perspectives on New Zealand art through a selection of works from the collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The coast is central to the way of life of many in Aotearoa New Zealand and it has been throughout our entire history. Integral to te ao Māori, the Māori world, the interconnectedness of land and sea is reflected in cultural narratives and practices. The coast is at times a source of sustenance and employment, at others a route for travel, a space of recreation, conflict, well-being or inspiration, but also, as the climate continues to change, at the frontline of danger. The coast is a threshold, an in-between zone, a perpetually shifting meeting point of land and sea that prompts us to examine our relationships with both. In this exhibition, artists from the 18th century to today ride the oceans’ currents, traversing themes from the enormity of the Pacific to the vessels that have crossed its expanse and plied Aotearoa’s coasts, and exploring their personal responses to the shore as well as the legacies of colonial encounters and conflict.

Threads of Time: Travel, Trade & Textiles is a jewel-box display in the historic Mackelvie Gallery that offers a survey of European art from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Presenting for the first time new acquisitions and recent donations to our Auckland audiences, this exhibition also showcases beloved paintings and sculptures from the permanent collection, some of which have not been on display for several years. Five thematically-driven, Salon-style hangs underline the sumptuous materiality of fabrics, both as depicted subjects in art and as physical supports that sometimes peek through a painting’s layers of pigment and varnish. Products of technology and trade, fabrics are cultural artefacts. They are also markers of social status and expressions of individual taste and sentiment. As such, their depiction in paintings, sculpture and works on paper is the outcome of precise negotiations between artist and client. Interpreting works from the permanent collection through this social and historical lens, Threads of Time explores how fabrics can offer insight into the interwoven threads of fashion, art and identity in the politics and cultures of the past.

This exhibition brings together a series of works from international private collections, all of which are being shown to the public for the first time. The exhibition spans over sixty years of Bourgeois's artistic career, from her early paintings in 1945 to her textile works from the last year of her life. Bourgeois is widely acclaimed for her psychologically charged and bold sculptural practice, exploring themes such as memory, family, body, and the subconscious, often drawing inspiration from her personal experiences. Her most famous works are a series of large-scale spider sculptures, which have been exhibited in many major international cities.

“Endless Giacometti” transports viewers to the French capital. This rotating exhibition features 50 lithographs from Alberto Giacometti’s most significant print project, “Endless Paris” (conceived 1957–66; published 1969), depicting street-side cafes, tree-lined boulevards, and the shopping arcades of the “City of Lights.”

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