City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi re-opens in its heritage building in Te Ngākau Civic Square after two years on Saturday 10 October, with an exhibition from one of the most significant artists of the 21st century, Cornelia Parker.

“This is the biggest show that New Zealand will have seen in years. To have Cornelia Parker exhibit here so comprehensively is a privilege. What a way to open City Gallery Wellington,” says City Gallery Wellington Director Charlotte Davy. “From the breakthrough work that made her a household name in Britain, to her latest installations, to work that has not been seen in over two decades, this is an exhibition that will become part of our collective memory. Cornelia’s exhibition is full of beauty, humour, transformation and resurrection. I have no doubt that visitors will be astonished by the immediacy of the works. Her work will open you to new ways of thinking and will stay with you long after you leave.”

The Cornelia Parker exhibition is curated by City Gallery Wellington’s Senior Curator, Aaron Lister, and UK-based independent curator Andrea Schlieker, former Director of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Britain London.

Parker is one of contemporary art’s great alchemists—a master of metamorphosis and transformation; a maker of objects and encounters full of awe and wonder. Based in London, Parker is renowned for her large-scale installations which push the boundaries of what art can be and how it might function in and impact on the world. She often uses found or discarded materials, which are variously squashed, exploded, shot, burnt, broken, suspended, inhaled, exhaled, chewed, spat, stained or cast from cliffs—subjected to often violent processes of transformation through which they become something other or opposite.

Driven by curiosity and often made in collaboration with others, Parker’s work is one of reversals and inversions. Her acts of unmaking, remaking, and reassembly are thrillingly subversive, recalibrating our understanding of a material, an object, or the histories and possibilities they embody. Ever alert to the urgencies of our time, Parker spins the familiar into incisive and witty metaphors for the political, intellectual, and cultural conditions that shape our world. This is Parker’s first solo public gallery exhibition in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the first survey of her work since the landmark retrospective at Tate Britain in 2022 that cemented her status as one of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary artists.

Taking over the entire gallery, this exhibition features over 50 artworks and includes sculpture, installation, video, works on paper, photography, photogravures and a new series of paintings made on glass. It brings together Parker’s era-defining suspended installations Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988), Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), Perpetual Canon (2004) and War Room (2015) with a number of more recent projects, focusing on work made since the Tate retrospective. The video installation THE FUTURE (Sixes and Sevens) (2023) is made with and gives voice to a group of school children contemplating their futures amid political instability and climate crisis.