Auckland City Art

Art Sunday coincides with the opening of The 4th Auckland Triennial and with all the Precinct businesses open on that Sunday as well as free entertainment and giveaways it should be a great day.

Art Sunday is an opportunity to celebrate the Auckland Art Precinct, The 4th Auckland Triennial, the building of the Auckland Art Gallery and the fact that we live in a culturally and artistically thriving environment. Some events that will occur during the Art Sunday include a children’s drawing competition at The Lane Gallery, a coffee voucher handout at Parsons Bookshop, and Gow Langsford Gallery will be holding a draw to win a collection of art books including a signed copy of Max Gimblett’s 2003 monograph. (Conditions apply.)

Start your art adventure in Khartoum Place where you can pick up your Art Sunday map then follow the yellow dots. Throughout the Precinct, local cafes will be serving great coffee and the galleries will be offering boutique NZ wine and of course some of NZ’s best art.

Galleries and participating businesses will be open 12 - 5 pm.

Auckland Museum has joined forces with some of the biggest names in New Zealand music, including Tiki Taane, Nathan Haines and Don McGlashan, to work on a project called Sonic Museum, for a series of exclusive new music tracks. Musicians and sound artists from the dance, rock, ambient, orchestral and jazz scenes have been commissioned to write and record a track that interprets a gallery of their choice in the museum. Galleries include the World War II Hall of Memories, Ancient Worlds, the Oceans Gallery and Maori Court.
 

In colours commissioned especially from the glitter manufacturer Dear Beauty, Dear Beast, is a handsome show of new paintings by Reuben Paterson. The series began for Paterson as a reaction to New Zealand's provocation debate. In the way that previous bodies of work have honoured his whakapapa and found basis in the emotional responses to his genealogy, Paterson views these works, in part, as a personal homage to the victims of murder cases which have successfully used the provocation or "gay panic" defence. 

The work suggests that in the same way that we have an underlying culture of racism, there is also an underlying culture of homophobia.

Auckland born, Felix Kelly (1914-1994) fled New Zealand as a young man for the bright lights of London. He never returned, but, unlike other New Zealand expatriate painters who quickly removed their homeland from their subject matter, Kelly kept painting an increasingly misremembered New Zealand which with each new work became a more and more fantastical place.

Kelly established himself as a graphic designer in 1930s London before moving seamlessly into stage and interior design in the 1950s. All this time he was also establishing himself as a painter of note. Initially exhibiting alongside Lucian Freud and Julian Trevelyan – and on one occasion Frances Hodgkins – Kelly soon developed a romantic, surreal style entirely his own, and cultivated a rich, upper-class clientele whom he supplied with house portraits, straight or strange as they preferred. In this his career bore a startling resemblance to that of Charles Ryder in the Evelyn Waugh novel, Brideshead Revisited.

A ‘Singing Cloud’ made up of 4000 microphones, love letters staged as political protests, sailing, surfing, birds flying, performance, an eco-friendly home and over 20 works newly commissioned to fit the theme…and that’s just a taste of New Zealand’s leading international contemporary art exhibition the 4th Auckland Triennial, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon.

This year, after 3 years in the making, you will be the first in the world to see works that have been especially created for the Triennial, as well as a range of contemporary art from around the world. Presented by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki with Auckland Triennial Partner AUT University and in association with exhibition partners Artspace, St Paul St and The George Fraser Gallery.