“These selected works on social and cultural importance inspire my imagination to feed an innate responsibility towards visually acknowledging my parents and their generations, intrapsychic migration experiences in Aotearoa.” Andy Leleisi'uao.
Andy Leleisi'uao + James Robinson
RAW
Bergman Gallery special exhibition project for the Aotearoa Art Fair 2025 VIP programme.
Opening Saturday 3 May, 12-2pm.
RAW marks the first time pairing of two uncompromising Aotearoa artists - Andy Leleisi'uao and James Robinson - whose distinct practices meet in a shared urgency; to make sense of fracture, pressure, and psychic residue in contemporary life. Though emerging from different cultural lineages and visual vocabularies, both artists work from positions of lived intensity.
RAW is not a theme; it's a state. A refusal to soften the edges.
For Leleisi'uao, this new suite of large format paintings is a shift away from the symbolic abstraction he is known for and into the terrain of figuration and portraiture. These are works that speak plainly and powerfully about the long tail of Pacific migration to New Zealand. His subjects - factory workers, mothers, sons, misfits - don't perform resilience; they carry it. In Pushing Possible Rainbows, figures haul bright trolleys etched with the names of their families and churches, making labour a kind of procession. In Assimilation Brown, the New Zealand flag is reimagined through coconuts, a material reference that both localises and satirises the politics of national belonging. Works like Fa'afetai, Fa'afetai, Fa'afetai, And She is and Fuck Off!!! move between reverence and resistance, painting memory not as a backdrop but as something active and ongoing.
Robinson, in turn, brings work forged in the pressure chamber of 2024. His large-scale installations RAW NAKED NOW and UN SEEN are built from the "old brain," a term he draws from Len Lye, where creation springs from evolutionary reflex rather than polished intention. Robinson's approach is visceral, material heavy, and driven by impulse rather than design. The installation RAW NAKED NOW doesn't illustrate social collapse-it embodies it, dragging the viewer through a compressed state of overload, distortion, and flickering insight. Smaller works like FIELD UPLINK and THEY KILLED ME MUM ME DAD AND ME BROTHER hold a quieter but no less charged space, connecting individual trauma with inherited, often invisible, histories.
While Leleisi'uao's works are anchored in the experience of post-war migration, the promise of New Zealand industry, and the social silence that followed events like the Dawn Raids, Robinson's navigate a different but equally urgent field: the internal debris of contemporary collapse, the noise of the now. What connects them is not style or genre but a shared refusal to disengage. Their works are constructed rather than composed. They do not soothe. They name things, sometimes with humour, often with fury.
Both artists are acutely aware of their place. Leleisi'uao makes work about people who had to fight to be seen; Robinson works as if survival depends on saying the unsayable. Each turns to painting and installation not as solutions but as tools for exposure. If there is hope here, it's not in resolution - it's in the act of making, and in the decision to keep going.
RAW doesn't ask for understanding. It offers contact. The real, the difficult, and the urgent laid bare.
