Luise F ong.
Opening Saturday April 11th, 12-4pm, all weclome.
This exhibition brings together Luise Fong and Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka, two of Aotearoa’s most compelling abstract practitioners whose recent work reinvigorates material, form and cultural resonance. Fong’s practice has evolved over decades around rich painterly surfaces and lyrical abstraction. Her work—held in major public and private collections across New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong, including Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and The Fletcher Trust Collection—balances gestural freedom with nuanced investigations of colour, texture and spatial tension, tracing memory and perception through abstraction.
Christchurch-based interdisciplinary artist Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka has received international recognition through exhibitions such as the 2020 Biennale of Sydney. His trademark smoke and spiderweb compositions are a defining and enduring aspect of his practice, reflecting a sustained engagement with material residue, transformation and metaphor. With works held in major public collections including Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery, Maka’s recent canvases extend this lineage, employing elemental processes to evoke complex histories and ancestral presence.
Presented together, the new works of Fong and Maka enter a productive dialogue across abstraction, surface and cultural resonance. Their pairing emphasises how contemporary abstraction can embody lived experience, ancestral connection and expressive materiality, inviting viewers to encounter perceptual depth and rich formal intensity.
