The weather's a bit shit so you can't go to the beach, you've binge-watched all your favourite shows, and you fear for your safety stepping outside with Auckland's current random tendency for mini tornados and roof-ripping winds. What is there left to do but take in some culture, via Auckland's glorious plethora of warm, dry art galleries?

Auckland Arts Festival has dawned on the city, offering a delicious spread of ways to spend your time this month. However, if you have no idea where to start and prefer a slightly smaller menu of arts offerings then you've come to the right place. This month our review team of art critics Lucinda Bennett, Lana Lopesi and Francis McWhannell has...

'My interest in celestial mapping is as a kind of ground zero of meaning-making and storytelling', starts Zac Langdon-Pole. 'Connecting the stars and making constellations out of them often tie to origin stories. In this sense, the journey will look at a plurality of origins, and how they do, or do not, relate,' explains the winner of the next BMW...

The Telegraph described it as an "ambitious and astonishing exhibition" while Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones declared he didn't just like the art but wanted to live in the world it portrays. He also speculated that modernist masters like Picasso were more influenced by Oceanic art than we might have previously realised.The opening...

An anonymous arts donor wrote a cheque for $500,000 to complete the Lighthouse sculpture on Auckland's Queens Wharf when construction costs went through the roof.

This year, New Zealand artist Zac Langdon-Pole won the art award of a lifetime, the BMW Art Journey prize, on the strength of work exhibited at Art Basel Hong Kong.Berlin-based, Langdon-Pole has just completed a residency on the remote Fogo Island in Newfoundland, Canada — part of winning the 2017/18 Ars Viva Prize in Germany, along with...

What could a medieval female mystic have to offer a contemporary artist?Sriwhana Spong has seen a snake, befriended a rat, cast a spell for a critically endangered bird. She has engaged with all manner of living creatures in her work and yet her latest exhibition is titled for a lack of animal: a hook but no fish.For me, this is a foreboding...

Peter Stichbury's last portrait exhibition at Michael Lett's was of wonderfully delicate graphite drawings, but in this presentation he is back to his characteristically glowing, clean-faced, intensely psychological, painted heads. With a graphic flatness that links them to comic strip art, but with extraordinarily fine detail (such as precision...

A warning, perhaps, for reviewers. On the second floor of the Govett Brewster large sheets of paper are lit by vivid red lights. In the gloom, we can make out semi-deconstructed poems and brief statements: coherent, unclear, clear – she / shallowness-depth-she / Less-less-than lack-she. The artwork is Bad Review (2018), and in it Sriwhana Spong has...

Art Basel announced that the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist Zac Langdon-Pole has been named the next winner of the BMW Art Journey. An international jury unanimously selected Langdon-Pole from a shortlist of three artists whose works were exhibited in the Discoveries sector at this year's Art Basel Hong Kong.Langdon-Pole's installation at...

Auckland Art Fair puts the spotlight on this city as a place to see the best in contemporary art from the Pacific Rim. Dionne Christian asks some of the artists what 'place' means to them — in particular the space they work in.

Living in 12th-century Germany, Hildegard von Bingen was a well-known mystic and prolific polymath. At Disibodenberg monastery, where she spent most of her life, she wrote on science and medicine, composed one of the largest surviving repertoires of medieval music, penned what is perhaps the first morality play, and created what was arguably the...

Te Papa's biggest change since opening 20 years ago has been revealed for the first time.Its new gallery space Toi Art is the equivalent of 15 tennis courts in size. It has increased the national museum's floor space for art by 35 per cent.

For her first solo exhibition in the UK, London-based New Zealand artist Sriwhana Spong excavates the Lingua Ignota, a secret language composed by 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Across the Pump House Gallery's four storeys, works ranging from costume to votive offerings, large-scale watercolours and a percussive instrument orbit the...

One of the most tiresome criticisms levelled at the contemporary art scene is that it is not 'the real world'.The implication being of course that the art world is a playpen for snowflakes like me, a fantasy land where unicorn chasers have time out from the 'big issues' that those at the coal face have to confront 24/7. There may well be some...

Steve Carr is well known for his inventive, spectacular and often funny videos, and unusual (often droll) sculptures, but this new show has an installation of sequential photographs (pinned to the wall) and is comparatively serious in mood, focussing on a ballerina’s hand gestures. The photographs are in the main gallery, but downstairs are two...

Visitors to collector Joop van Caldenborgh's newly opened Museum Voorlinden near the Hague are immediately drawn to a pair of glass doors that open upon a room filled about halfway to the ceiling with multicolored balloons.On a recent day, museumgoers old and young queued up to make their way through the balloons to the exit door. Some laughed....

The outcome of a summer residency with the Visiting Artist program hosted by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in conjunction with the Dunedin School of Art, Eve Armstrong's exhibition Growing Demand has the artist developing from familiar territory in a specific response to place. Presented in two parts—on DPAG's 'big wall' overlooking the...

The world-renowned Biennale of Sydney is back next year to celebrate its 45th anniversary exhibition. Set to maintain its status as the largest and best-attended contemporary arts event in Australia, the 21st Biennale of Sydney is anticipated to once again bring an impressive and diverse range of contemporary artists and artworks to the...

From 23 to 25 March, the 5th edition of Art Basel, Hong Kong will showcase 242 premier galleries from 34 countries and territories—including Australia—presenting works of the highest quality, ranging from the Modern period of the early 20th century to today's most contemporary artists in three specific categories: Galleries,...

The arrival of a substantial new public artwork in the downtown centre of New Zealand's largest city is always an exciting occasion, but the 'opening' of Michael Parekowhai's The Lighthouse on the waterfront - on Queens wharf, at the base of the main street - is such that you would have to be made of solid rock not to get a real thrill. The work's...

From a studio beside Colin McCahon’s former Titirangi home, artist Imogen Taylor contemplates the art world sausage-ocracy, her pretty/ugly work and having a parent in the Act Party.“It’s really hard to make people laugh with art. Or it’s like a one-liner and you laugh once, and then it’s gone.” Imogen Taylor is speaking about the very funny zine...

There has long been a profound and complex relationship between sculpture and architecture, with many artists encountering or breaking down a boundary between the two disciplines. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, questions what we know and understand about design through [Re]construct, a group exhibition selected from the Arts Council...

A show about light: a light show – what might a curator put in? Just about all art concerned with making the world visible in some sense speaks of light, the very condition in which it was made.