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
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
Ann Parker Gallery (Whanganui, New Zealand)
Ann Parker Gallery presents a group of six artists working across painting, sculpture, and conceptual practice. Auckland-based painter Toby Raine creates gestural, impasto, expressive portraits in oil and acrylic and has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including at the Melbourne Art Fair, Gow Langsford, and James Makin Gallery in Australia. Warwick McLeod, now based in New York, works across painting, print, and sculpture, creating mythic and poetic works, and has exhibited widely, including at Te Whare Rehua, Sarjeant Gallery, Aratoi Art Gallery, and Te Uru Gallery (Lopdell House).
Rob McLeod is a prominent painter known for political, satirical works that offer social commentary, with a long history of exhibitions at major institutions including City Gallery Wellington, The Dowse, and Te Whare Rehua, Sarjeant Gallery. Jackson Harry, an emerging artist based in Dunedin, works in figurative and conceptual sculpture, recently exhibiting his bronze works at the Sydney Art Fair. Aidan McNeillage, an emerging Auckland artist, is known for whimsical, futuristic sculpture using 3D printing and mixed materials, and recently exhibited with the PlayStation artist-run space in Wellington. Together, the presentation highlights a dynamic range of contemporary practices grounded in material exploration and narrative.
Image Credit: Rob McLeod,
Aotearoa Art Fair 2026 takes place from 30 April – 3 May at the Viaduct Events Centre, Auckland. First Release tickets are on sale now – buy online.