Collectors, take your marks.
The first weekend of May is set to be a big one for the Aotearoa art market, with two art fairs taking place simultaneously in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Stalwart of the business Aotearoa Art Fair will return to the waterfront’s Viaduct Event Centre with more than forty-five dealer galleries from across the country and the Asia-Pacific region. Uptown at their off-K Road venue, May will present their boutique fair for the first time. Is this town big enough for the both of them? It’s been interesting, with the launch of May, to see how it chooses to distinguish itself from the Aotearoa Art Fair—where “there’s something for everyone,” while May is pitched at those who “take art seriously.”
Our 2025 Art Fair Guide considers the two fairs and what they might tell us about the state of collecting, wealth, taste and collegiality in Aotearoa’s creative industry. Who are their target audiences? What is the relationship between social capital and capital capital? Is there, at the end of the day, any material difference between these two fairs for the artists who show in them? To answer these questions, we’ve selected some highlights from both fair programmes based on visitor archetypes Art News has observed at fairs past.
Which one are you?
Aotearoa Art Fair
The Pop Collector
You’ve been a devout collector of rare and vintage prints online, and there’s an A3-sized gap in your hallway’s gallery hang, but the rush of a good eBay score just isn’t quite hitting the way it used to. Trust us when we say, nothing compares to the thrill of the one-off.
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland gallery Two Rooms will be exhibiting thirty-five black-and-white works from the British artist-satirist David Shrigley. Since graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 1991, Shrigley has produced an immense corpus of drawings—all in A3 format, all featuring a simply described scene or object and a line or two of pithy text. They riff on a children’s picture-book image–text matrix, but give this primary device of language acquisition a droll, neurotic or existential spin—as if the entrance into meaning means making sense of nonmeaning, a quality Shrigley describes as “an insane anxiety.”
The Magpie
Gold has always been your colour, but you’re running out of days in the year to give every piece from your jewellery box its moment in the sun. Friends say your collection of bling could fill the window display at Michael Hill, but you dream bigger, and the walls are looking decidedly bare. After all, who said keepsakes have to be small?
Monica Rani Rudhar’s giant earrings will take to the walls at Foënander Galleries. Rudhar conjures the love language of gold using lustre glaze on terracotta, achieving the gleam of precious metal without its environmental toll—or the cost to collectors. Her sculptures, some of which dangle at more than a meter long, pay homage to South Asian jewellery and the forms that connect the artist to her family despite the cultural distance of diaspora. Magpie-eyed collectors can line their nests with shiny stuff in the happy knowledge that when these earrings are in the room, there’s enough gold for everybody.
The Window Shopper
Underconsumption-core is in and you’ve hopped on the trend, vowing 2025 to be a No-Buy Year. With your newfound mental clarity, you’ve begun to question this whole art-as-private-property business. You’ve got last year’s [cult shoe] and muesli bars from home packed in your ludicrously capacious bag—but still plenty to see at the Aotearoa Art Fair.
A new iteration of Seung Yul Oh‘s ‘Cycloid Series’, recently shown at Waiheke Island’s Sculpture on the Gulf, is
among the fair’s selection of large-scale sculpture on offer as part of the Aotearoa Art Fair Sculpture Trail, presented by Viaduct Harbour. There’ll also be live performances throughout the weekend, including one by Louie Bretanã titled Eat My Rice, which reimagines a Filipino pre-colonial feast. Squiggla are back with their interactive Making Space, and there’s the usual programme of artist, collector and curator talks, because you’re not the only one suffering cognitive dissonance.
The Just-Here-for-the-Facilities
You don’t feel at all guilty about your secret stash of unopened hotel toiletries. No, you have no plans to use any of them—bar soap strikes you as kind of, well, dirty—but there’s something so satisfying about those teeny white and pink packages with gold lettering. And what a thrill to be able to hold a whole bottle of shampoo in the palm of your hand. It’s not a kink if it’s hygienic, right?
Presenting with Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington gallery Jhana Millers, Emily Hartley-Skudder will install a replica of the art fair’s less-elevated-but-still-very-classy brethren: the home expo bathroom. Ensuite fetishists will be rapt by Hartley-Skudder’s worshipful paintings of seashell-shaped sinks, girlish white vanities and flamingo bath toys, all arrayed against a lilac and turquoise linoleum that is less the décor of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and more Todd Haynes’s Safe. In her inclusion of an actual bath, commode and basin, the artist pays wry lip service to the remnants of bodily function in a society chasing the ultimate cleanse. One furnishing in particular demands existential contemplation: Can a corner tub ever truly be clean?
The Neo-Victorian
It’s been exactly a year since Taylor Swift dropped The Tortured Poets Department—not that you’re counting—and finally the world is ready to admit that high ruffled collars are here to stay. Having waited this long, you’re more than ready to stuff a Wunderkammer full of curios and hang your parlor with as many gloomy portraits as a person laid out on their fainting couch could desire.
The Sanderson booth will include Mickey Smith’s large format photographs of hardback spines, which capture the self-seriousness of colonial reading matter (“Daily Devotion,” “Gems of Literature”) with Daguerreotype formality. Sharing in the spirit of gloaming are the painters Molly Timmins, for whom semi-abstract landscapes glow blue in perpetual twilight, and Katherine Throne, under whose loaded brush plump roses swell against black ground. As for sculpture: Ray Haydon’s swirling bronze and steel curios aren’t not love-knots. Against all this enchanted melancholy, the popsicle optimism of Kāryn Taylor’s acrylic lightboxes offers a portal back to a twenty-first century, in which dark-panelled rooms come with the comfort of a heat pump.
The Cradle Snatcher
The younger, the better is your ethos when it comes to collecting. Nothing gets your stocks up like the scent of epoxy resin, Rothman Blues and Comme des Garçons’ CONCRETE wafting off a recent Elam grad, and you’re still kicking yourself over that Simon Denny plastic tablecloth that got away back in ‘06. At least you were right about Bitcoin.
Horizons is the fair’s dedicated emerging-artists section. Becky Hemus—Editor-in-Chief of Art News and The Art Paper, and co-founder of the pathbreaking online art fair project May Fair, which took place in July 2020 (not to be confused with this year’s May)—has invited culture-shaping artists and curators to create booths featuring work by their peers.
One to watch is presented by Pōneke-based DJCS, who will exhibit a nuanced take on the “queer ecologies” phenomenon with an exhibition titled The Harvest. Also upstairs, newcomer Charles Ninow will exhibit desirous paintings by Thom Le Noël and Artor will show Michelle Reid‘s gauzy landscapes.
The Tomb Raider
For you, it’s a matter of the deader, the better. Your usual haunt is the auction house and you won’t get out of bed for anything less than an art historical diamond. You’ve got your Hotere and the McCahon, but now you fancy something a little more … avian.
Ivan Anthony will have a selection of works from the Estate of Bill Hammond (1947–2021), including the last work he painted before his death in 2021. Like all of Hammond’s paintings since the early 1990s, these pieces feature his iconic bird-people, famously inspired by the artist’s trip to the Auckland Islands in 1989, home to the yellow-eyed penguin, white-capped mollymawk, sooty shearwater, and endemic species of snipe, teal and dotterel. This subantarctic Empire of Birds became an endless imaginative source for Hammond; he envisioned an elaborate prehistory for this land, depicting his beaked figures keeping watch over still harbours, playing pool or piano, engaged in inscrutable rituals. In Pack of Five (1), the magical homelands Hammond often showed his bird-people occupying disappear, replaced by the wood grain of the board onto which they are directly painted. They are more like shadows than ever.
Ans Westra (1936–2023), however, is being practically resurrected by {Suite} Gallery. On Saturday and Sunday their booth will be transformed into a room from Westra’s house using furniture from Junk & Disorderly, Auckland’s favourite antique shop. Portraits of Westra painted by artists such as Selwyn Muru and Barry Crump will hang in the salon.
The Power Patron
It all started with the seat you sponsored in the Auckland Art Gallery auditorium. Seeing your name on that shiny plaque beneath the chic coiffure of an influential curator, you sensed that this must be how Raphael felt seeing his own face painted next to that of Aristotle, Plato and Ptolemy in The School of Athens (1509–11). At the exclusive post-opening dinners to which you now find yourself invited, you like to ask the table thoughtful questions such as, “Indigenous art, is it here to stay?”
The Aotearoa Art Fair knows how to treat a VIP and the main proceedings will be complemented by collection tours, invitation-only dinners, artist studio visits and talks, and exclusive behind-the-scenes access to cultural institutions throughout the week and in the lead-up to the fair.
The Person of Interest
Your payment comes from an offshore account, but the gallerist doesn’t ask questions. Nice assets—whoops, you mean artworks … Can they deliver direct to your storage facility?
Stéphane Breitwieser was SO small-time and you’re looking for something big-ticket. Robert Heald has some luxurious new Andrew McLeods in his booth, but perhaps your best bet is to go international, lest an institution comes sniffing for a survey show loan down the track. Seoul-based gallery One and J will be bringing paintings by Suh Yongsun, whose Self-Portrait with Red Eyes (2009) Artforum described as “looking like a man who has seen horrible things and is willing to recount them.” But don’t worry, your secrets are safe here. Paintings don’t talk, money does.
May
The Patient Zeroes
You haven’t missed a show at 3 East Street since Michael Lett began mounting projects there in 2022. You’ve got custom Kate Newby glass installed in your bathroom windows, and a Mike Hewson palm tree basketball hoop for the grandkids out back. You would have taken his marble slab table too, but you couldn’t plumb the drip into the flat roof of your Ron Sang-designed Titirangi treehouse, which is already prone to leaks. Curators look to you for acquisition advice, and you are looking forward to May. The Aesop soap in the bathroom lends the whole affair an air of cultivation. But so do you: you’re the Patient Zero collector.
At May, you’ll find much to your liking. Phillida Reid is showing works by Vivian Lynn (1931–2018), a fierce and diligent critic of art’s phallocentrism throughout her life. You couldn’t agree more with her conviction that “a feminist oil painting on canvas is an oxymoron,” and she reminds you of all those years spent reading and debating the theories of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous.
Disneyland Paris will make their Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland debut with collaborative booth by David Attwood and Matthew Brown, presenting sculptural pieces attuned to commodity fetish and the mechanics of merchandising. You were an early adopter of the Post-Ironic Readymade, so whenever you’re in their home city of Boorloo Perth you make sure to stop in at the one-room cottage barely larger than a carport in which they stage their programme. Before that you kept up with the shows they hosted from the disused servicemen’s toilet in Naarm Melbourne. The artists, you thought, cleverly mobilised the lingering affects of social hygiene and class politics—think towelling, tiling and eschatology. (You made peace with the no-brand soap.)
In the Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington scene, you’ve kept tabs on newcomer gallery Envy, who will be showing a selection of sculptures by Suji Park: exploded takes on the classic bust. You like her bubbling, creaturely forms, somewhat resembling figurative plastiglomerates—the anthropogenic hybrids of sediment, natural debris and polyurethane scientists have found in increasing numbers along global shorelines—or, might we say, friendlier versions of the disturbing, fractured bodies of Hans Bellmer’s surrealist dolls?
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