If you’re in the market for contemporary art, hop across the ditch. Auckland’s 12 leading galleries are along and around Karangahape Road.
It’s the sort of thing you need to tip visitors off about, or they’d miss it: Sandwiched between the gentrification creep of a Tesla showroom and the city’s oldest cemetery – and within less than a 15-minute stroll from one end to the other – is the very best of Auckland’s contemporary art scene.
With new exhibition openings several times a week, it’s great for collectors. The tight geographical concentration of the galleries makes for a leisurely pedestrian art tour – by foot being the best way to explore when you have a few opening-night wines on board. Gow Langsford also sells privately on the secondary market, and a major work they recently sold by the late Colin McCahon – arguably the country’s most lauded artist – fetched $NZ2.2 million .
Gow estimates a waiting list of about 80 people eager to buy her work. As for Karl Maughan and his hyperreal garden scapes, “we can’t keep him in the gallery for less than a day”, says Gow, of Maughan’s large-scale pieces that can sell for around $30,000. “There’s a strong attention to craft in my gallery – and not in a hippie craft sense: Painting is craft; writing is craft,” she says. “I’ve never seen any boundary between the very best of ‘art’ and ‘craft’ – it’s all cultural expression. I’m not interested in boring demarcations,” she says, not dismissively, but in support of broadening the narrow diet of contemporary art that is fed to the market.
About a five-minute walk along K Road is Michael Lett. The gallery is a beautiful space in itself, an elegant insertion into the road, with its flotsam of colourful characters, rainbow pedestrian crossings, bars and hip restaurants.
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