Art fair sampler

Auckland Art Fair

Viaduct Harbour

Beaumont St

May 1 - 3

The Auckland Art Fair which opened last night is a pretty big affair. With thirty eight galleries and around 500 works on display this is as big as most big public art galleries you would get to anywhere in the world.

It takes a good two hours to get around and that’s if you don’t talk to anyone and you only give each work a cursory look. Of course if you stop and really look at some of the works you could end up staying the day.

So just to make it a bit easy here are a few of the top shops you should see.

Stand No 9. McNamara Gallery. This is the Wanganui based gallery specializing in photography and has some a number of local and Australian photographers. Among the works on show is a stunning large black and white work by Anne Ferran Scenes on the Death of Nature (A$6500) which is based on neo-classical figurative subjects.

Stand No 11. Sue Crockford Gallery is showing a new work by Peter Robinson Mushroom Hunter ($38,000) which is a departure from his recent polystyrene works

Stand No 12. Peter McLeavey. The main work on display is a huge Bill Hammond painting Cave Painting 4 which is on sale for $325,000. This is one of the artist’s major works.

Stand No 17. Rosyln Oxley9Austarlian) with an outstanding Patricia Piccinini work as well as one of the controversial images of naked young children by Bill Henson

Stand No 18. Gow Langsford have managed to pack in twenty works into their small stand which has some hot of the canvas John Pule paintings at $12,500 a couple of Judy Millar who will be showing at the Venice biennale this year and a Phantom work of Dick Frizzell.

Stand No 24 Michael Lett with a superb new Shane Cotton

Stand No 25 Anna Schwartz Gallery. Some impressive video work by Australian-based but New Zealander multi-media artist Daniel Von Sturmer. He creates is inventive interventions with space, architecture and visual phenomena, and was one of three artists to represent Australia in the 2007 Venice Biennale as well as being a finalist in the Walters prize. The videos are $17,000 each

Stand No 34. Bartley Nees features a range of Andre Hemer’s painting from the small works at couple of hundred dollars to the larger at few thousand.

Stand No 37, Ray Hughes is showing a dozen works by Joe Furlonger one of Australia’s important cotempoary landscpae painters including Samford Valley – Yellow Bay ($18,000). They also have a remarkable rarely seen landscape painting of Colin McCahon priced at $100,000.

Strand No 38. Two Rooms has an interesting range of local and international artists including the British artist Basil Beattie (Night Embrace $60,000) and Isaac Julien’s lightbox work Taonga Mahi ($52,800).