A new suite of exhibitions opening at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery on 22 May has a focus on painting, and in particular the relationship between the material qualities of the practice and inherited forms of knowledge.

There is no before is Indigenous Australian artist Dale Harding’s first New Zealand solo exhibition. Combining contemporary art and cultural practices that extend over thousands of years, Harding presents an exhibition that adds to the canon of his family’s cultural production. It is evocative of place, his cultural and physical landscape—Queensland’s central highlands. Working with ochres, tree resin and wood sourced from the site, Harding will present a new body of minimalist paintings and sculptures along with a collection of taonga loaned from Te Papa which are connected to his family.

Stars start falling brings work by Teuane Tibbo, Salome Tanuvasa and Ani O’Neill into conversation, looking for moments of connection and divergence, persistence and change between them. Taking the practice of painting as its starting point, Stars start falling considers how the artists have engaged with place—physical, remembered, imagined—through their art making.

Len Lye is represented with two new exhibitions in the Len Lye Centre, Wand Dance and Tangibles: 1963– 1969. Wand Dance is a dazzling installation of seven choreographed ‘bell wands’, in an iteration seen only once before. Wand Dance was the first of three large kinetic sculptures produced by the Len Lye Foundation and Team Zizz over a three-year period. Tangibles: 1963–1969 is the second in a pairing of retrospective exhibitions looking at kinetic sculpture from a defining period in Lye’s career.

Raewyn Martyn’s installation in the Window Gallery on Queen Street uses biopolymer materials to coat the gallery walls, creating a site-responsive painting that reacts to the environmental conditions of the space.