Must-See Auckland Shows Across the City of Sails This May

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A fifteen-metre hand-painted octopus has appeared in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour Marina, its vermillion body the size of a small truck, tentacles sprawling across the water’s surface. Lisa Reihana‘s Te Wheke-a-Muturangi (2022) marks the opening of a concentrated week of exhibitions and events across Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest city .

Aotearoa Art Fair (1–4 May 2025) will showcase 60 galleries at the Viaduct Events Centre, while May Art Fair (2–4 May 2025), initiated by gallerists Andrew Thomas (Michael Lett) and Sarah Hopkinson (Coastal Signs), will present 15 exhibitors—including local galleries Sumer and Season, alongside international participants such as Phillida Reid and Fine Arts, Sydney—at 3 East Street. The overlapping schedules created an intensified moment for Auckland’s art community, with major solo presentations opening simultaneously across the city: Kalisolaite ‘Uhila‘s durational performance and large-scale paintings at Britomart; the first comprehensive retrospective of photographer Mark Adams at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; Peter Hawkesby‘s hand-built ceramics at Anna Miles Gallery; and new work by Jonny Niesche, Jude Rae, Matt Arbuckle, and Gregor Kregar at commercial galleries throughout the cities suburbs.

Kalisolaite ‘Uhila: Performance and Pavilion Panels at Britomart

Te Ara Tāhuhu and Galway Street, Britomart
Performance: 2 May 2025, 12–6pm

On 2 May 2025, artist Kalisolaite ‘Uhila will perform Kelekele Mo’ui (Living Soil) at Britomart, sitting buried to his neck in soil from noon until 6pm. First performed at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery in 2024, the durational work explores the relationship between land, labour, and life, drawing on the Tongan concept of maumau-taimi—often translated as “wasting time”. The performance contrasts moments of intense physical exertion with sustained stillness, questioning value systems that shape our understanding of productivity and the body.

Serving as backdrop, ‘Uhila’s Kini Lotokolo (Cleaning the City) series has been photographed and adapted for Britomart’s Pavilion Panels along Te Ara Tāhuhu and Galway Street. These canvases bear marks made with rakes, machetes, and other tools—gestures that reference ‘Uhila’s own experience as a construction labourer in Britomart. Following his 2021 Harriet Friedlander Residency, ‘Uhila spent 2024 in New York, where he engaged with pioneering performance artist Tehching Hsieh. His practice brings a distinctly Tongan perspective to the lineage of durational performance art.

Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki,
Wellesley Street East, Auckland CBD
29 March–17 August 2025

Mark Adams b. 1949, New Zealand Follow +

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki presents the first comprehensive retrospective of photographer Mark Adams (29 March–17 August 2025), featuring more than 65 works spanning five decades. The exhibition examines Adams’ engagement with sites of historical and cultural significance—from locations of early Māori-Pākehā contact to documentation of Samoan tatau traditions and Māori carving. His black-and-white and colour photographs trace persistent questions about place, memory, and identity in Aotearoa and the Pacific.

Peter Hawkesby: Rotunda

Anna Miles Gallery
10/30 Upper Queen Street
26 April–31 May 2025

If clay could sing, Peter Hawkesby would be its Roy Orbison—cool, unhurried, and just a bit wild. In Rotunda, Hawkesby’s hand-built ceramic forms pile up like a jazz riff, loops and swirls improvising their way into being with the assurance of someone who has spent decades letting his fingers think for him.

Born in Auckland in 1950, Hawesby has spent his career sidestepping the Anglo-Oriental tradition in ceramics, preferring instead to let clay be messy, unpredictable, and gloriously itself. Each sculpture—eight of which are presented to brilliant effect at Anna Miles on vintage wooden plinths—are a small, stubborn argument for the pleasures of touch and joy of play. A stint in Tokyo in the 1980s infused his work with Japanese sensibility, and two decades running Auckland’s Alleluya Bar and Café have given him a front-row seat to the theater of everyday life. Hawkesby makes work that feels at once ancient and entirely new—a masterclass, if you like, in the art of not giving up.

Ethan Braun and Lina Grumm: Intimation of Endless Space Given in a Small Window of Time (approximately 10 minutes)

Artspace Aotearoa
292 Karangahape Road
2 May–22 June 2025

For anyone seeking out a deeper engagement with the possibilities of contemporary art, then Artspace Aotearoa, one of the country’s most important non-profits, deserves to be on your itinerary.

A collaboration between Berlin-based composer Ethan Braun and graphic designer Lina Grumm, Intimation of Endless Space is an immersive installation that invites the audience to consider the limits of communication and the poetics of space through sound, vision, and the body. Audiences are invited to experience the work in concentrated, ten-minute intervals, encouraging deep listening and reflection on perception.

The exhibition is part of Artspace’s ambitious 2025 programme, curated by Ruth Buchanan, which features four shows by both established and emerging international and local artists. The theme, inspired by a question raised by British artist Lubaina Himid, who this year will represent Britain at the Venice Biennale—asking, ‘Is language large enough?’.

Tangaroa Birch, Anton Forde, Robert Jahnke, and Graham Tipene: Ngā Hau e Whā | Tāmaki Makaurau

Föenander Galleries
1 Faraday Street, Parnell
23 April–13 May 2025

Bringing together four leading Māori artists—Israel Tangaroa Birch, Anton Forde, Robert Jahnke, and Graham Tipene—this exhibition explores different forces that have shaped Auckland.

Each artist has been invited to offer a response to the exhibition’s title ngā hau e whā, a reference to both the literal winds that meet in Tāmaki Makaurau alongside the city’s metaphorical currents of people, ideas, and cultures.

Israel Tangaroa Birch’s luminous steel and lacquer works refract and absorb light, evoking the shifting vitality of the winds and animating the space. Meanwhile, Anton Forde references ancient legend and the dispersal of the ‘wind children’ with sculptures carved from materials including kōkawa (andesite), pounamu, obsidian, basalt, and hardwood.

Robert Jahnke’s triptych, Te Hau o Te Tai Rāwhiti, draws on the history of hoe waka (canoe paddles) traded between iwi and the crew of the Endeavour in 1769. Finally, leading figure in both public art and tā moko Graham Tipene embeds his works with iconography and narratives passed down by ancestors.

Gregor Kregar: Reflective Paradigm

Gow Langsford Gallery, Onehunga
26a Princes Street, Onehunga
12 April–10 May 2025

At Gow Langsford Gallery, Onehunga (12 April–10 May 2025), Gregor Kregar’s Reflective Paradigm presents mirrored and fractured sculptures that create shifting choreographies of light. The Slovenian-born artist’s work recalls the perceptual investigations of James Turrell, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin, though Kregar inflects these concerns with a degree of play—his large-scale interconnected triangles suggest both geometric minimalism and supersized Rubik’s snakes.

Jonny Niesche: Fat Lava

Starkwhite
66 Great North Road, Grey Lynn
3 May–7 June 2025

Swerving from his usual sleek minimalism evoking 1980s glam rock, Jonny Niesche’s Starkwhite exhibition dives headlong into the chromatic delirium of post-war West German ceramics.

As a teenager, the Australian-based artist stumbled upon a collection of these ceramics in a secondhand shop in Vienna. Although finding their garish glazes repellent at the time, he has revisited the unsettling palette of these ceramics and given them a Millennial, Instragrammable resurrection.

Niesche initially studied at the Sydney College of the Arts under Mikala Dwyer, later completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Heimo Zobernig as his mentor. Both artists encouraged him to tickle the boundaries of painting and sculpture, leading him to explore ideas around how material, colour and form shape perception and space. By drawing on the aesthetics postwar ceramics through a lens of contemporary abstraction, he proposes a reflection also on cycles of taste and material innovation.

Jude Rae: various objects and Matt Arbuckle: common fate

Two Rooms
16 Putiki Street, Grey Lynn
11 April–17 May 2025

Jude Rae’s quietly meditative paintings transform everyday objects into ‘poems on perception and materiality’, while Matt Arbuckle’s process-driven canvases evoke landscapes through gesture and shibori-inspired surface manipulation.

Paired together, the exhibitions offer a nuanced conversation about the act of looking-and making-in contemporary painting. It’s an astute match bringing together two distinctive approaches to abstraction and still life.—[O]

Main image: Lisa Reihana, Te Wheke-a-Muturangi (2022). 15m diameter, Aotearoa Art Fair Sculpture Trail. Presented by Viaduct Harbour Holdings Ltd, with support from Auckland Council and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert. Photo: Jeremy Ho.