AOTEAROA ART FAIR | 33

For the Aotearoa Art Fair weekend, the gallery presents a curated group exhibition bringing together new and recent works by a dynamic group of women artists whose practices span painting, drawing, and material-led abstraction. Reflecting the gallery’s ongoing commitment to championing women practitioners, the presentation highlights distinct approaches to image-making, surface, and perception, where each artist develops a highly individual visual language while remaining in productive dialogue with the others.

Featured artists include Georgia Arnold, Kathy Barry, Emma Fitts, Henrietta Harris, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, and Rebecca Wallis.

In the work of GEORGIA ARNOLD, painting becomes a site of intuitive construction, where layered surfaces, gestural forms, and subtle tonal transitions are used to build compositions that oscillate between abstraction and suggestive imagery. Her works often hold a sense of emergence, as though forms are in the process of being resolved or dissolving into paint itself. Recognised as one of the most exciting young artists in Aotearoa, Arnold’s work investigates the interplay between expressive mark-making, autobiography, memory, and spatial relationships, often navigating the tension between conscious control and intuitive impulses. She employs techniques such as automatism and mind‑wandering to carve out imagery that explores networks, plant and human entanglements, and fragments of imagined worlds.

KATHY BARRY contributes works that explore the relationship between painterly gesture and structural composition, negotiating the space between control and spontaneity through layered visual systems. Her practice often holds painting in a state of productive tension, where compositional clarity emerges through accumulation and adjustment. These recent works bring together colour and pattern to vibrate as frequency to affect the viewer energetically.

EMMA FITTS presents a suite of single-colour compositions that reduce painting to its most essential conditions. Each work holds a singular chromatic field, where slight variations in surface, density, and edge become the primary site of attention. Through this reduction, Fitts invites a heightened awareness of material presence and the perceptual effects of sustained looking. Emma Fitts is a critically acclaimed contemporary artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, textiles, photography and installation. Fitts’ work draws deeply on art histories, architecture, material culture and biography, creating richly textured forms that engage both historical narrative and material presence. Her processes often combine formal abstraction with researched storytelling and alternate archives.

New landscape works in oil by HENRIETTA HARRIS have been made as a response to her recent time spent as the inaugural Creative in Residence at Whakapapa / Ruapehu. The resulting works are a response to Harris’ time in the landscape and witnessing first hand, the effect that climate change has had on the area itself - but as well, the socio economic flow on effects this has had on the local population that has historically relied on the area as a tourist destination.

LAYLA RUDNEVA MACKAY extends her exploration of abstraction through paintings that foreground spatial ambiguity and material depth. Her works operate through the interplay of translucent layers, tonal shifts, and structural interruptions, creating compositions that feel both constructed and unstable. Colour functions as a spatial agent, shaping perception as much as depicting form.



SARAH SMUTS-KENNEDY presents new abstract paintings developed through a process-oriented practice that combines gestural mark-making with layered surfaces and chromatic modulation. “My practice is grounded in listening as a primary method. I approach painting not as image-making, but as the construction of conditions in which movement, structure, and coherence can emerge over time. Gesture functions as a structuring force rather than an expressive one, organising complexity into fields that stabilise through cycles of disruption and resolution. Across series, works operate as interconnected systems rather than isolated images. I understand painting as a tool — a site of attunement influenced by artists such as Agnes Martin and Emma Kunz, whose works function as instruments for alignment. Ultimately, the work seeks to generate conditions of “Alive-ing”: sustained states of dynamic coherence.”

REBECCA WALLIS presents works grounded in a refined sense of structure and restraint. Her paintings explore balance through carefully calibrated compositions, where line, surface, and negative space are held in deliberate tension. Material decisions are precise and economical, resulting in works that emphasise clarity, spatial rhythm, and compositional control. Working through abstraction, Wallis uses surface, light, and material to explore thresholds of perception, subjectivity, and emotion. Her paintings often disrupt conventional structures—collapsing surface, dissolving pigment, and troubling edges—to mirror the fragility and fluidity of the self. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and feminist philosophy, her work considers the uncertain terrain between self and Other, presence and absence, image and trace.

Rather than asserting a single curatorial narrative, the exhibition is structured as a field of encounters—between image and surface, gesture and restraint, atmosphere and structure. Installed within the context of the Aotearoa Art Fair, it offers a focused lens on contemporary practice in Aotearoa New Zealand, foregrounding the depth, range, and ongoing evolution of women’s contributions to painting and related disciplines.

For further information, or to request a PDF catalogue price list once available, please email the gallery: info@melanierogergallery.com

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The fair is open to VIP and Premium Pass holders on Thursday, 30 April from 1pm, wth the opening night party taking place Thursday evening, 5pm-9pm. General entry to the fair is Friday and Saturday from 11am-6pm and on Sunday from 11am-5pm.

VIP Preview: Thursday, 30 April, 1pm – 5pm
Opening Night: Thursday, 30 April, 5pm – 9pm
Friday, 1 May, 11am – 6pm
Saturday, 2 May, 11am – 6pm
Sunday, 3 May, 11am – 5pm

For further information about the Aotearoa Art Fair and to purchase your tickets: www.artfair.co.nz 

Image: Sarah Smuts-Kennedy