Revealed, concealed

New Gallery [now Mackelvie Gallery], c1916

One of the highlights of the developed Gallery building is the Mackelvie Gallery, which has been painstakingly returned to its former glory as a Victorian neo-classical picture gallery. The interior of this 1916 room was removed in successive renovations in the 1950s and the 1980s. The last time its decorative columns saw the light of day was in 1979 when Billy Apple temporarily exposed them as part of an artwork titled Revealed/Concealed.

Apple is best known for his self-branding, for his witty and conceptual Pop works and for his sly investigations into the workings of the art market. In 1975, and again in 1979 he turned a critical eye on New Zealand’s art galleries, touring around the country creating works which explored the ideology and politics of art exhibition spaces – the behind-the-scenes mechanics of an art gallery. (See Wystan Curnow's account of this tour from page 10 of the Gallery Quarterly here).

Mezzanine Gallery [now Mackelvie Gallery] 1956

At Auckland Art Gallery in 1979, Revealed/Concealed literally exposed the architectural history of the gallery, as Apple cut away the walls of the room to show the 1916 columns which were hidden inside. During the ‘modernisation’ of the Mackelvie Gallery under director Eric Westbrook in 1952, the columns had been walled over to create a sleeker, cleaner and more modern look. By 1979, no-one remembered what they looked like – as Wystan Curnow has recorded, when Apple’s project was being discussed, wild speculation about beautiful orange marble columns began to circulate around the Gallery. When the walls were cut away and the columns were finally revealed, they turned out to be rather less spectacular concrete.

Billy Apple, Revealed/Concealed 1979

Courtesy of the Billy Apple Archive

Revealed/Concealed was a two-part work: Apple counterbalanced the revelation of the historic columns by concealing a strange wall niche. This shallow alcove had been built into the wall above the Mackelvie Gallery’s famous curved staircase during the 1952 renovations – for what purpose was unclear exactly, but it spent more time covered by a wall hanging than performing any useful function for the display of art. Apple filled it in, erasing this odd eccentricity from the otherwise undisturbed smoothness of the gallery wall.

Billy Apple, Revealed/Concealed 1979

Courtesy of the Billy Apple Archive

As Wystan Curnow wrote in a 1980 article on the project, “For the artist the art gallery space is a given. For any artist. The gallery wants to give the artist a show, he wants to make something of it. What space does it give him, this show? Which space is it, exactly? What is it? I mean, what does it amount to? These are questions REVEALED-CONCEALED brings to mind. Because it makes changes to and shows changes in the gallery space, the work brings particularly to mind the instability of that given over time. History as a given, then. The record of change; itself subject constantly to revelations and concealments.”

Billy Apple, Revealed/Concealed 1979

Courtesy of the Billy Apple Archive

By displaying the spaces that were themselves designed for the display of art, what Apple ultimately revealed was how these containers for art are flexible and unstable – they are subject to change both physically and ideologically.

Mackelvie Gallery 2011

The recent reinstatement of the Mackelvie Gallery’s 1916 design was a triumph of heritage restoration. The interior of the room was almost entirely stripped out in the 1980s, and the original intricate plasterwork has been carefully rebuilt using only two surviving historic photographs. Revived again 95 years after it was first opened, the current (and original) design of the Mackelvie Gallery forms an appropriate period context for the Gallery’s Victorian painting collection. The resurrection of the Mackelvie Gallery acknowledges an important period in our building’s history, and also shows how in art galleries, as in art, history can be accommodated, referenced, revealed and concealed.

Three cheers for the preps!

The creation of an exhibition is a huge team effort, and at the end of the process it all comes down to the team of preparators and technicians who physically install the artworks in the galleries. Each exhibition comes with its own challenges - whether it's moving very large, heavy or fragile objects, installing 7,081 tiny objects in the right configuration, or abseiling down a wall to hang a work in a tricky spot. The photos below show the Gallery’s install teams in action - from 1954 to today.

1954: The Museum Microcosm: Items from the Auckland War Memorial Museum

1971: Morris Louis (In 1971, not only was it okay to handle artworks without wearing gloves – it was okay to handle artworks while smoking your pipe!)

1981: Artichoke. The legendary exhibition where every painting in the collection was put on display.

1995: Transformers. Installing the 5000 polystyrene balls of Nike Savvas’ installation Simple Division.

2001: Bambury: Works 1975-1999. The installation of this exhibition of Stephen Bambury’s work required a steady hand and a head for heights.

2001: 1st Auckland Triennial: Bright Paradise: Exotic History and Sublime Artifice; Ashley Bickerton, Them [detail], 1998

2002: Love and Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria.Before the development project, large works like Frederic Leighton’s The Syracusan Bride, 1865-6 had to enter the building via crane over the café balcony …

… and then be shuffled past the muffins and paninis in the café …

… before finally arriving in the gallery for installation. Of course, large works would also have to exit the building using the same circuitous route. Hooray for our new, spacious loading bay and goods lift!

2003: Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith

2005: Mixed-Up Childhood. Assembling the fragile glass structure of Louise Bourgeois’ Cell 1990-3.

2005: Mixed-Up Childhood. Unpacking a fragment of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s The Return of the Repressed 1997.

2005: Framing the Past

2006: Summer Daze. Don Driver’s McKechnie Brothers Mural, 1967.

2008: The collection was packed up and moved into offsite storage before the building development project was begun.

2008: The Enchanted Garden

2008: The Walters Prize. Installing the 7081 tiny canvases of John Reynold’s Cloud, 2006.

2009: Yinka Shonibare

2009: The Julian and Josie Robertson Promised Gift: An Exclusive Preview. With only nine hours to install, this exhibition went up in double-quick time. (Artwork shown: Pablo Picasso, Mère aux enfants a l'orange (Mother and children with an orange), 1951, promised gift of Julian and Josie Robertson)

2010: Call Waiting: A Celebration of the New Gallery 1995-2011 (See our previous blog about the installation of this artwork here.)

2011: Toi Aotearoa: New Zealand Art 1965-1900. The first work to be hung in the developed Gallery was Colin McCahon’s 1952 painting On Building Bridges.

2011: Installing Choi Jeong Hwa’s Flower Chandelier, 2011 in the North Atrium.

2011: Whizz Bang Pop. Installing the Boyle Family’s The Gisborne Triptych, 1990 in the Parkview Gallery.

2011: Whizz Bang Pop. Installing Luc Piere’s Tower, 1973 in the Parkview Gallery.

123 years ago ...

Poster advertising the opening of Auckland Free Public Library, 1887
E H McCormick Research Library, Archive Folder PH01/3

As we race towards the reopening of the Gallery this week, it’s hard not to think about how this building’s original opening day must have caused similar levels of excitement and anticipation.

Initially designed to accommodate Auckland’s public library, art gallery and municipal offices, the building’s first opening ceremony took place on 26 March 1887, when Auckland Public Library opened to a great deal of fanfare.

Sir George Grey, who was instrumental in the creation of both the Library and the Gallery, spoke at this event: ‘Often, worn out and tired, I have imagined when the day came how triumphant I should feel.’ (words which ring true to current Gallery staff!)

Unknown photographer, Sir George Grey c1863

Auckland Art Gallery opened nearly a year later, on 17 February 1888. In addition to the 14,000 books and manuscripts he had gifted for the establishment of the Public Library, Grey now donated his collection of paintings, which formed the basis of the Gallery’s permanent collection. These works hung behind Governor Sir William Jervois when he declared the Gallery open, saying:

‘I look forward to the day when this building will be too small for the Auckland Gallery of Art and the gifts of Sir George Grey and other generous people who have helped to form it... I doubt not, however, that for many a long year the fine structure in which we are assembled will afford ample space for the display of many works of art both of ancient and modern painters, which will be owned by the Municipality of Auckland.’

Josiah Martin, Auckland Free Library and Art Gallery 1887, Auckland Libraries, A11347

Jervois didn’t have to wait long for the day that the building was too small for the rapidly-growing Gallery. In 1888 it occupied a single room and was run by the city's Librarian, Edward Shillington, but by 1893 the first addition was built to house the Mackelvie Collection.

Over the past 123 years the Gallery has grown steadily, and its heritage building has grown and changed with it. In the 1880s, the opening of the Auckland Public Library and Art Gallery was seen to ‘mark an epoch in this city’s progress commercially, financially and intellectually’ – the current redevelopment project also shows us how far we have come since those early days.

Eye-opening experiences

Friend of the Gallery Warwick Brown shares his memories of the Gallery building in today's instalment of 'If these walls could talk...'

Having been born in 1940 I remember the Auckland City Art Gallery building when the southern end still housed the Old Colonists’ Museum and the library. The former was infrequently visited and the displays never changed. I often wonder what happened to the exhibits when this museum closed.

I visited the Art Gallery as a schoolboy, and it seemed very old-fashioned and atrophied to me. My earliest vivid memory is of the Henry Moore sculpture show in 1957. Moore was already my hero, and, as I had never seen a full-size piece, the maquettes on show seemed monumental to me. I spent hours at the exhibition and returned at least three times, jostling with the big crowds.

This experience was followed in 1958 by the excellent show of British art toured by the Arts Council of Great Britain. It was my first opportunity to view a body of modern work from outside New Zealand, and it further opened my eyes, as it did for many others.

Unknown photographer, Mackelvie Gallery Sculpture Court, 1953
silver gelatin print, E H McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki Archive Folder PH 01/15

I remember the alterations done to create a mezzanine floor, the new curving staircase guarded at the bottom by a sculpture of a nude seated man, hands on knees. On that mezzanine I will never forget the wonderful show of big, fluted, painted canvas works by Don Peebles. They seemed to me then, and do still, to be works of international importance.

Of the many great experiences I have had in the gallery since, the two big McCahon retrospectives first come to mind. After studying the one in 1972 (Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition) on two occasions, I decided McCahon was an invention of the art critics, who were putting one across the public. Thankfully, by the time of the second one the scales had fallen from my eyes.

What else? Frank Womble’s fantastic Zpace Zhow of assemblages, paintings and collage in 1978. Gavin Chilcott’s wonderful painted dining room in the 1980s. The Boyle family’s reconstructions of reality in the 1990s. So much more.

Boyle Family, The Gisborne triptych, 1990
painted fibreglass, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 1990

One thing I really miss is the annual show of emerging artists, drawn from around the country. To a young collector they were a great help. Why were they discontinued?

Warwick Brown

'Marvellous, moving, magnificent...'

Some members of the Friends of the Gallery have written to us to share their own memories of the Gallery – below is a selection, with recollections ranging from spine-tingling emotion to gluttonous buffet-hogs!


"Far and away my most memorable time was at Te Māori - Te Hokinga Mai. My friend and colleague at the Auckland Teachers College Wally Penetito arranged for a contingent of us to be involved – it was marvellous, moving, magnificent. Those truly remarkable taonga - it made the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

"It was a landmark for Māori and Pakeha - we were all so proud. It changed people’s thinking. We all took our students (the trainee teachers) through and many went more than once. I know I did.

"Often you would see Māori speaking to their tupuna/ancestors. A window was opened to another world that was right here in our own country – it was like glimpsing a parallel universe."

Maris O’Rourke

Visitors explore the Te Māori exhibition

"There is no greater pleasure than a walk around the Auckland Art Gallery and then a discussion of what you've viewed over coffee in the cafe. My memories of Grahame Sydney's exhibition (On the Road: Paintings by Grahame Sydney, 2001) and the memories this raised from my South Island soul will live forever in my memory."

Susan F. Stevenson (nee Graham)

Installation view of On the Road: Paintings by Grahame Sydney

"I will always remember Friends functions where lovely food was served. We always had to dodge a certain gentleman who would always be there and eat himself silly. This was supposed to be a 'finger buffet' but he ate the equivalent of a three course meal!"

Gill Knight

Buffet table at a Friends event, 2005 - please the gentleman depicted is NOT the one mentioned in the above anecdote!

Thank you to the Friends who contributed these stories - feel free to share your own in the comments!

My Gallery

As a born and raised Aucklander, the Gallery was a recurring presence in my childhood. My earliest memory of it is only half-formed: flickering images of intimidating carved wooden figures. A quick talk to my mum confirmed we did indeed go to see the exhibition Te Maori Te Hokinga Mai: The Return Home – I was only four years old at the time but it clearly made an impression.

The first exhibition I really interacted with, though, was Rembrandt to Renoir: 300 Years of European Masterpieces from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, as a 10-year-old. It was a Sunday family outing and we dressed smartly for the occasion. I remember the paintings displayed against black walls and being taught by my parents how to view the impressionist paintings from a distance so they ‘made sense’.

A visit to the Gallery was a common school trip (see also: MOTAT, the Museum, Kelly Tarlton’s). Most of my recollections, however, centre around the journey rather than the exhibitions: riding on a bus, lining up outside in the courtyard for what seemed to be an interminably long time and on at least one occasion spotting a dead pigeon in the fountain. Inside? I haven’t the foggiest idea what we saw but I know we had to be very quiet, and we were not allowed to run around or touch anything. This was a huge challenge for my hyperactive self.

A quick flick through my parents’ bookshelf reveals the catalogue for Love and Death: Pictures from the Collection (1993-1994) so it’s highly likely I was carted along to that too, and I know I saw at least one of the McCahon retrospectives that were held in the 1990s.

In sixth form I started studying art history and a visit to the Gallery was no longer something that was organised for me, but something I instigated. After a term studying pop art, I bowled on up to the Andy and Friends exhibition with my mother and a friend feeling extremely smug for already knowing so much about many of the artworks. How clever I thought I was to be able to appreciate pop art, while my poor bourgeois mum preferred ‘old-fashioned’ landscapes and portraits. We also popped over the road to the NEW Gallery to see Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Paintings of Richard Killeen, where we found more of a middle ground.

Everything changed again when I turned up to university in my scruffy jeans and realised how much I really had to learn about art. Of course, I knew what I liked, but often my reasons for enjoying a painting were nothing to do with execution, technical excellence or profound subject matter. While other students gazed intently upon a Very Serious History Painting and scribbled down notes, I would be sniggering at artworks like Cornelius Johnson’s Portrait of a Lady.

Cornelius Johnson, Portrait of a Lady, 1633

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased with funds from the M A Serra Trust, 1977 

I challenge you to look at this woman without a titter. I love her gormless expression, the absurdity of her broad-shouldered attire and the odd composition that sees her sitting beneath a vast amount of empty space. Maybe I wasn’t the most academic of scholars, but I did learn the importance of having an emotional reaction to an artwork.

After graduating I have to admit I forgot about my gallery. I did make it in to see Rita Angus: Life and Vision and the preview of Julian and Josie Robertson’s Promised Gift (which you can see in its entirety when we open on 3 September) but most of the time it fell into the ‘one of these days’ basket when planning my weekends.

So there you have it – a potted history of my interactions with the Gallery. The thing that stands out when I look through the exhibitions history is how much I have missed. Like many Aucklanders, I’ve spent years professing my earnest intentions of visiting the Gallery more often and never quite got around to it. Countless exhibitions full of artists I now count amongst my favourites have passed me by and I regret this.

So how about you? Were you an avid gallery-goer, or were you only ever dragged in kicking and screaming? In 15 days’ time, we’ll be giving Aucklanders a whole new set of memories, but right now I’d love to hear how the Gallery has looked through your eyes over the years...

Documentation through Drawing

In 2009, artist Fiona Connor produced a series of drawings recording the demolition of the Gallery’s Edmiston Wing. The seven works in the Documentation through Drawing series were commissioned for Reading Room, the journal of art and culture published by the Gallery’s E.H. McCormick Research Library. They form a delicate and poetic response to the demolition of the Edmiston Wing, a part of the building that Connor had known since she was a child. The drawings are a personal record of a chapter in the Gallery’s life and Connor’s role as witness and documentarian.

With Documentation through Drawing, Connor explores the transience of things that seem permanent. She layers images to show time passing, and mirrors the cuts and perforations occurring in the Gallery’s architecture by physically cutting and removing sections of paper.

In this interview, Connor talked to me about her experience of making these beautiful and elegiac drawings:

What sparked your interest in this moment in the Gallery's life? Can you tell me how the project was initiated?

At the time I was working at the University of Auckland in the Classics and Ancient History Department and would visit Albert Park to eat my lunch. The demolition of the Edmiston Wing was incredible, like this sanctuary for art that I grew up with being deconstructed before my eyes! So I perched on the slope above the building site and took some pictures and made some drawings. Around the same I had a conversation with Sue Gardiner who encouraged me to push this further so I approached the Gallery and asked for access to the site which was granted on condition that I did a Site Safety Course.

Documentation through Drawing: Demolition at the Auckland Art Gallery 4, 2009

How do you use drawing in your practice, and what led you to use drawing as a method of documenting the demolition?

I was thinking a lot at the time about how photography gets used a trusted form of documentation but how drawing does not get used so much. I really enjoy drawing. For this series I would go really early in the morning to the building site. When I finished up I always had this feeling like: well what ever else is going to happen in the day I am already really satisfied. So nice to have this time to sit, watch and be in observation mode.

Can you describe how it felt to be in the partially-demolished building?

It was really energising to be amongst all the action. Sitting in the galleries watching these incredibly familiar surfaces (the brown tiles on the second floor, the carpeted stair case in the lobby, the Victorian architrave and fret work in the permanent collection) all being peeled back layer by layer to reveal their materiality. One morning I was sitting in one of the tiled galleries when the roof was ripped off and the ceiling became the gusty blue spring skies; it was like a perfect Situationist moment! Amazing. For me there was this lingering nostalgia for these times or moments in art history.

Documentation through Drawing: Demolition at the Auckland Art Gallery 5, 2009

I especially like how in one of the drawings you include the clock face in the Gallery's tower, and it shows two different times. Can you talk about how, rather than producing each drawing in one session, you returned to them at different times?

Most of these were done in one or two sittings because the site was changing so rapidly. Like I would do some drawing then come back and the spot that I had been sitting on was literally gone. Most of the drawings took about three hours which is about how long I can stay focused before I start sabotaging the work. This constraint of time and the materials I chose gives the series a consistency.

Documentation through Drawing: Demolition at the Auckland Art Gallery 1 2009

I think there is a sadness in the way that your drawings are so physically tangible, especially through the collage and cutout elements, but they show the building being demolished and physically removed. It's almost like they are fragile stand-ins for something that no longer exists. Do you think of them as melancholy?


That is funny for me I can’t remember any melancholy. When I made the cuts I was thinking about dealing with the paper as an architecture in itself.

Documentation through Drawing: Demolition at the Auckland Art Gallery 6 2009

International Museum Day

Jeffrey Harris, The Memory of a Journey, 1974
oil on hardboard, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Every year, museums and galleries around the world celebrate International Museum Day.

This year the theme is 'Museums and memory' - a theme which perfectly coincides with our 'If These Walls Could Talk' series on this blog. You can read all the entries in the series here.

If you have memories of the Auckland Art Gallery, we'd love to hear from you so we can expand the series to include stories from everyone in the community. Drop us a line in the comments below, or contact us via the website.

Find out about how other New Zealand museums are celebrating International Museum Day on the Museums Aotearoa website, and get a global view here.

Pacific Cities

Yesterday in the E.H. McCormick Research Library I came across a little catalogue of an exhibition held at the Gallery exactly 40 years ago. Called Pacific Cities, it was a remarkable show of artworks loaned from institutions in nine cities around the Pacific: Honolulu Academy of Arts, Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, Henry Gallery in Seattle, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, The National Museum of the Philippines in Manila, Queensland Art Gallery and the Newcastle Art Gallery.

This international spread was put on to celebrate the opening of the Gallery’s new Edmiston Wing. Officially opened to the public by Governor General Sir Arthur Porrit on the 16th April 1971, this addition to the building had been a long time coming. Funded from a generous bequest made by prominent Auckland citizen Philip Edmiston, the building project had been the subject of planning and discussion since the details of Edmiston’s will were announced in 1946. Decision-making was complicated by calls to erect an entirely new building for the Gallery, but in 1953 the City Council resolved that the Gallery should remain on its historical site.

The Edmiston development was designed in the office of the City architect, Mr E.M. Wainscott and the project architect was Mr B.C. Robinson. The new wing took three years to build, with staff offices relocated to the Town Hall from 1968. The design of the wing was a ‘modernisation’ of the existing Victorian architecture of the building, which mimicked the rhythms of the old façade in a stripped back, modern style.

Moira McLeod, writing for the trade journal Building Progress, waxed lyrical about the new design: “Bold concrete slabs cast in situ with special boxing add to the contrasting light and shade, solid and void, design of the exterior.” She went on to detail interior furnishings of the wing, including the flooring of “manganese brown acid-resistant quarry tiles” and walls covered in “buff-painted Scandinavian jute”; noting especially that “The 65oz bronze deep velvet pile carpet used in the lower galleries and Indian red carpeting on the stairway and upstairs lobbies were special runs by Feltex NZ Ltd.”



The newly austere galleries of the Edmiston Wing provided the perfect stage for the artworks of the Pacific Cities show. This exhibition self-consciously located Auckland in an international network of galleries and museums in a way which prefigured current trends in contemporary art exhibitions. The selection of works was deliberately contemporary and international, with the vast majority of artworks dated within 10 years of the exhibition’s opening in 1971, and several works having been made as recently as 1970.

Ian Fairweather, Epiphany, 1962

Artists were selected because they were seen to represent geographic diversity. The Queensland Art Gallery lent Ian Fairweather's Epiphany, saying 'His art has its roots in that of Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines, Bali and India and shows particularly the influences of Chinese calligraphic painting and that of the Indian cave paintings of Ajanta.' Other galleries lent works that they felt best demonstrated the cutting-edge work of the young artists of their region, such as the Vancouver Art Gallery with works like Iain Baxter's Bagged Landscape, which is made from vinyl and contains water.

Iain Baxter, Bagged Landscape, 1966

Interestingly, given the current success of exhibitions like the Auckland Triennial and the Asia-Pacific Triennial, which are designed to bring local and international art together, Pacific Cities did not include any New Zealand art. The Gallery’s then director, Gil Docking, wrote in the exhibition catalogue “As the host city, we have allotted our galleries to our guests”, and continued on to comment, “Many of us would like to see the Pacific Cities Loan Exhibition become a triennial event on Auckland’s calendar.”