Futures: Spotlight on Young Galleries
Futures highlights emerging galleries and artist-run spaces, offering a platform for new voices and fresh ideas. Futures is where visitors can discover artists at an early stage of their careers, whose practices are shaping the next chapter of contemporary art in Aotearoa and across the region.
William Austin (Wellington, New Zealand)
William Austin presents three artists whose practices engage with memory, identity, and lived experience. Hariata Ropata-Tangahoe (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Te Ātiawa) is a senior Māori artist who has not yet received the national recognition her practice deserves. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on canvas, she creates fantastical paintings representing memory of whakapapa, manaakitanga, and Māori mythology. Having completed a Master of Fine Arts at Elam in the mid-1990s and worked consistently since the late 1980s, this presentation marks a significant return to Auckland, where she once lived and studied, and her first outing in the city in several decades.
Anna Sisson is an early career artist whose sculptural works explore queer identity through a gothic and romanticised sensibility, referencing medieval and renaissance periods while creating overtly queer and feminist environments. Mixing traditional materials such as lead-light glass with contemporary techniques, her work balances rawness and beauty. She studied at Elam School of Art, was a founding member of the TERROR INTL collective, exhibited with Envy at the May Art Fair in 2025, and has an upcoming solo exhibition in 2026.
Rangi White (Rongomaiwahine, Ngāti Rakaipaaka) is an early career artist whose work addresses post-colonial issues through a contemporary practice informed by lived and studied experience. Often incorporating readymade and found materials, his works carefully restructure objects into defined narratives, sometimes with a light touch of humour and wry intervention. He will present his first public gallery solo exhibition at Gus Fisher Gallery in February 2026, coinciding with Aotearoa Art Fair.
Image Credit: Julian Hooper, New Leven, 2025
Ann Parker Gallery
Ann Parker Gallery presents a group of five artists working across painting, sculpture and conceptual practice.
Toby Raine is an Auckland-based artist known for his gestural impasto paintings. He holds a Doctorate of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including with Page Blackie Gallery, Gow Langsford, and James Makin Gallery in Australia. He has been a finalist in the Molly Morpeth and National Contemporary Art Awards, and has exhibited at major art fairs including Sydney Contemporary, and Melbourne Art Fair.
Rob McLeod is an Auckland-based painter renowned for his dynamic works, characterised by a vibrant colour palette, thick, expressive paint application, and the innovative use of unconventional shapes. His work is held in major New Zealand public collections, including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Te Whare o Rehua, Sarjeant Gallery. McLeod has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, with presentations at leading institutions such as City Gallery Wellington and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, establishing him as a significant figure in contemporary New Zealand art.
Warwick McLeod is a Whanganui-based painter, sculptor, and printmaker who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, and Yale University. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Brooklyn Fireproof and Kentler International Drawing Space in New York, as well as major public galleries in New Zealand such as Te Whare o Rehua, Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui, Pātaka Art + Museum in Porirua, and Aratoi Museum of Art and History in Masterton. McLeod’s work explores personal histories and ideas of identity, family, and home, often examining relationships across generations, using powerful, symbolic imagery to reflect the complexities of contemporary life.
Jackson Harry is an emerging visual artist based in Melbourne. His work has been exhibited in galleries in New Zealand and Australia. He creates bronze sculptures using the traditional lost-wax casting process, finishing them by burning layers of acrylic onto the bronze and weathering the surface with wet stone. Harry recently exhibited his work at the Sydney Art Fair.
Aidan McNeillage is an emerging Auckland-based artist who holds an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts. He creates 3D-printed sculptures derived from smear frames—single images in animation that create the illusion of fast movement. These distorted moments, fleeting on screen, capture limbs multiplying, faces sliding, and bodies stretching. Taken out of sequence and frozen in space, they reveal the hidden scaffolding behind cinematic illusion. He recently exhibited at the Elam MFA Graduates Show at Gow Langsford, Onehunga, and at Play_Station, Wellington.
Toby Raine, Courtesy of Ann Parker Gallery
Nasha Gallery (Sydney, Australia)
Nasha Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Mark Maurangi Carrol, a Sydney-based artist whose works explore personal histories, cultural memory, and identity. Drawing inspiration from childhood experiences in the Cook Islands and Australia, his paintings often begin on the reverse side of loom-state linen, allowing industrial oil enamels to bleed through the surface. This process references both his printmaking training and traditional Cook Islands practices of Tīvaevae, Pāreu, and Tapa.
Mark Maurangi Carrol, The arrival of Marama, 2025
PEG Gallery (Wellington, New Zealand)
PEG Gallery presents three artists whose practices explore materiality, domestic space, and the boundaries between art and object.
Ed Bats works with painting, assemblage, and carpentry, evolving painted surfaces into shelving systems, furniture-like supports, and structural components that interrogate the boundary between display apparatus and artwork.
Ben Pyne’s ceramic practice engages with domestic architecture and provisional display, often producing works that resemble vessels, storage forms, or fragments of household infrastructure.
Hannah Valentine creates bronze sculptures inspired by household tools, children’s toys, the body, and familiar natural forms, translating intimate references into enduring objects that balance weight, delicacy, and everyday use.
Plomacy (Auckland, New Zealand)
Plomacy presents a dual-artist presentation by Brittany Walker Smith and Ruth Watson.
Ruth Watson’s internationally recognised practice re-orients maps and mapping processes through photography, video, and unconventional materials, examining how geographic and cultural authorities shape identity.
Brittany Walker Smith’s work is an exuberant rejection of minimalism in favour of decorative excess, using glitter, pleather, and vivid colour to transform everyday objects and reclaim dismissed feminine aesthetics as sites of resistance against societal expectations.
Ruth Watson, The Evangelist, 2025
Railway Street Gallery + Studios (Auckland, New Zealand)
Railway Street Gallery + Studios presents four painters whose practices reflect diverse approaches to narrative, atmosphere, and place.
Emma Hercus, based in Wellington, creates vibrant and complex figurative paintings that weave folkloric observations of daily life with personal memories, animals, plant forms, and patterns, often inspired by coastal rural environments.
Nicholas Pound works across painting, sculpture, and installation, creating hybrid works that move between earnestness and error, often engaging with impermanence, material process, and time-based mood.
Kyla Covic paints luminous skies and atmospheric effects inspired by the vast, ever-changing light of Aotearoa, exploring colour, stillness, and the sense of awe found in expansive landscapes.
Kyla Covic, Evening Glow on Linen, 2024
Aotearoa Art Fair 2026 takes place from 30 April – 3 May at the Viaduct Events Centre, Auckland. Advance tickets are on sale now – buy online.