Tim Melville are proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by Salome Tanuvasa, created during her time as the recipient of the 2025-2026 C Art Trust Award. The Award generously provides an award of $55,000 to support a mid-career contemporary artist for 12 months. Previous recipients include Jeena Shin, Andrew Barber, Anoushka Akel, Georgie Hill, Christina Pataialii and Kathy Barry. The award is a response to the fact that Aotearoa New Zealand’s contemporary artists are creatively rich but notoriously time-poor.

The curator for this year’s Award was Hanahiva Rose, Curator at Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, who writes: “Salome Tanuvasa’s thoughtful and evocative paintings explore the qualities of form and colour. I have been familiar with Tanuvasa’s practice for some time and was particularly struck by her recent paintings for their engagement with histories of European modernism.

With determined vitality, Tanuvasa’s paintings offer a contemporary Pacific response to abstract painting traditions, locating themselves firmly in her culture and community while looking out towards the wider world. Her work follows the possibilities of a line, a mark: their capacity to repeat, evolve and carry us through time and space.”

Tanuvasa herself describes her paintings as “communicating an intuitive sense of the places where I find joy—in my home and with my family.”

Indeed, her preparation for this body of work occurred alongside her family at the kitchen table. The artist and three generations of her family, sitting together, used random offcuts of coloured paper to make a large number of A4-size collaged paper works—some of which included traces of printed text or were embellished with crayon markings.

Tanuvasa chose a small number of these collaborative creations to work up into larger paintings.