AOTEAROA ART FAIR 2026
BLACK DOOR GALLERY PRESENTATION
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Jennie De GrootJennie De Groot’s new works, to be released at the Art Fair, draw on the use of whimsical, archaic, and surreal phrases—echoing a quiet “once upon a time” that signals entry into a mythical, timeless space. Each painting is positioned as a possible beginning, inviting the viewer into an experience that is theirs alone.
De Groot approaches landscape as a site of projection, memory, and affect—less a depiction of place and more an exploration of how it is felt and remembered. The forms are loosely anchored in real locations but ultimately constructed through accumulation and revision rather than direct observation. As she notes, her undergraduate studies in archaeology continue to inform this thinking: “I see landscape as something built over time—layered, revisited, and shaped through duration.” Non-naturalistic colour allows the work to move away from fidelity and toward emotional resonance. In this way, abstraction becomes a means of returning to landscape differently-slowing perception, introducing ambiguity, and resisting the immediacy of the easily read image. Each painting begins from a singular idea or memory, but does not seek to describe it, instead leaving space for a more open, subjective experience. |
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Kaye mcgarvaKaye McGarva’s new works for the Art Fair take their cue from terra d’ombra—Italian for “earth of shadow,” the natural pigment known as umber. Traditionally used to create depth and shadow, it becomes here both a material reference and a conceptual anchor.
In McGarva’s practice, colour and form work together to produce distinctly illusory spaces. The rich, earthen browns and subtle tonal shifts give rise to folded, creased surfaces that appear at once tangible and impossible—hovering between painting and object, image and perception. These forms seem to extend into real space, yet remain resolutely flat, unsettling the viewer’s sense of what is seen. As explored in her past work, and in her exhibitions with Black Door Gallery, McGarva is deeply interested in how vision constructs reality. The creases are not literal but perceptual—activated through light, shadow, and careful gradation. In this new body of work, terra d’ombra deepens that enquiry, grounding the paintings in an earthy palette while amplifying their illusory tension, where surface and depth continuously shift and remain unresolved. |
MARK WOOLLER
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Mark Wooller presents....
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