past exhibitions
August 2026
A selection of important works from the eighties and nineties from the archives of legendary painter, Philippa Blair
29 May to 20 June
In conjunction with the 2026 Auckland Photography Festival Orexart are showing the extraordinary pin hole photographs of Viky Garden.
2–23 May
Roy Good is a rare figure in New Zealand art: a painter, designer and spatial thinker who never separated disciplines. Working from his studio in the hills of the Waitākere, he quietly pioneered one of the country's most consistent and original modernist practices.
14 March – 4 April
Orexart welcomes this first show and representation of established artist Viky Garden. These works, personally selected from her ongoing engagement with the self as subject, show how her 35-year artistic practice is informed by an intimate yet universal empathy,
Summer Hang | Gallery Artists
Over the summer months, the Gallery will present a changing collection of works by represented artists. It’s an opportunity to revisit something you might have missed during the year, and to catch a glimpse of what’s coming up in 2026.
28 October – 29 November
Kathy Barber is renowned for the depth and stillness of her paint surfaces. Using techniques that owe their visual origins to Japanese calligraphy, aided by a patient building of layers, her works possess a meditative quality.
4 – 25 October
Jacqui Colley’s paintings in this exhibition offer a powerful antidote to a screen saturated world, inviting a deeper, multi-sensory engagement and a tangible connection to human history, and a connection to the physical world.
6 – 27 September
Zealandia is a largely submerged continent located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, mostly hidden beneath the waves, with only a few islands like New Zealand and New Caledonia breaking the surface. Geologically, it's characterized by its unique crustal structure and its separation from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. This series of paintings is inspired by, and references places of interest to all of us.
5 – 30 August
Throughout her art practice of more than 40 years, Bridget Bidwill has been dedicated to depicting the landscape. The hills, valleys, stones, rocks and shadows; the dark, the light, and the reflections, the trees, grasses and clouds all appear in her paintings in pieces, shards of glass, a challenge to reassemble.
5 July - 16 August
In July, Auckland painter Tony Lane mounted an exhibition at a medieval church in Ribadavia, Spain.
31 May–12 July
In July, Auckland painter Tony Lane will exhibit a suite of paintings at Igrexia de Santa Maria Magdalena, a medieval church in Ribadavia, a town in the Northern Spanish province of Ourense. In advance of this exhibition, and to rain a little Spanish sunshine down on Auckland, we are presenting Serenidade, a companion exhibition here.
12 April–10 May
In this postmodern age of appropriation and sampling, Martin Ball has added another dimension to the reworking of historical imagery. He chooses to work from his studio, drawing from secondary and tertiary sources, reinterpreting and reinventing along the way.
From 12 March 2025
Fresh from the studio and in advance of his upcoming exhibition, we present three exceptional figurative by Martin Ball
30 November – 28 December 2024
There is something of the alchemist about Greer Twiss, as he pours, bends and fashions the basest of materials into some of our most precious
works of contemporary art.
31 October – 21 November 2024
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
8 June–6 July
Orexart is privileged to re-present a selection of some of the extraordinary and powerful work Philippa Blair produced during the late nineties and early noughties in the studio she made with husband John Porter, in Venice California.
20 May - 6 June
A spin-off exhibition based on our presentation at Aoteaora Art Fair in April
Mikhail Gherman is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Karen Walker. The Captains Series is his first gallery exhibition, and offers up a collision of some of Gherman’s perennial obsessions: outsiders; junkshop art genres; solitary men; and a news cycle bursting with violence.
7 February through 1 March
Some small but perfectly formed works from our artists’ studios and archives
23 December through 21 January
Our summer hang features key works by some of our represented artists
4 November – 2 December 2023
Tony Lane's paintings resist casual interpretation. The work is complex, the symbols elusive. All paintings are abstract, even representational ones. The elements of a painting are symbolic, a kind of shorthand, for the artist’s concerns.
5 – 29 October 2023
Philippa Blair is an architect, surveyor, scientist, sculptor, dancer, horse rider, musician, linguist, teacher, mother; in truth she is an artist who brings all the attributes of the former to the table of the latter. Moreover, she is fearless, always has been, still is, her life is tied to her art.
7 – 30 September 2023
The paintings of Kathy Barber are derived from a montage of memories just out of reach, swirled together as a type of utopian landscape. The large sweeping gestures she has affectionately coined as ‘sidewinders’ help flood all the works with a light reminiscent of Turner.
5 – 31 August 2023
Encompassing images from around Whangarei and the Kaipara as well as Westland in the South Island artist and mathematician Peter James Smith is always inventive, always discovering, and here presents us with some of the largest single piece canvases he has ever completed.
7 – 29 July 2023
Through a collection of intuitive landscape paintings on heavy canvas Dr Leonie Ngahuia Mansbridge explores her connection to whenua as intertwined with her own whakapapa.
6 June – 1 July 2023
Jacqui Colley’s artworks are dynamic acts of painting and remembering. Each one is a visual statement within which are embedded moments of deliberation and serendipity, a fitting together of thoughts, actions, and reactions to the physical immediacy of making.