Spotacular

You’d have to have been liv­ing under a rock (by which I mean “not been in Civic Square for the last couple of weeks”) not to have noticed the out­break of spots all over the City Gal­lery. It’s an install­a­tion by Yayoi Kusama to pub­li­cise her Mirrored Years exhib­i­tion, which is a showpiece for the newly revamped and exten­ded gal­lery.

After nearly a year of clos­ure, the gal­lery is cel­eb­rat­ing its relaunch with the Gal­lery-a-Go-Go event in Civic Square this Sunday. While many will be most excited by the return of Nikau café (which reopened a week or so ago) and its fam­ous kedgeree, there are a whole lot of new gal­lery spaces to explore after the expan­sion. There’s the brand new Rod­er­ick and Gil­lian Deane Gal­lery of M?ori and Pacific Art, which will host Ngaah­ina Hohai­a’s Pari­haka-themed work; a new Adam Aud­it­or­i­um; and a much lar­ger Michael Hirschfeld Gal­lery. The open­ing exhib­i­tion there will be the huge install­a­tion Make Way by Regan Gentry, a Wel­ling­ton artist best known for his large-scale pub­lic sculp­tures explor­ing pub­lic space and urb­an change.

[more after the jump]

All this new space has been made pos­sible by the new exten­sion to the rear of the gal­lery. Designed by Stu­art Gar­dyne of Archi­tec­ture+, archi­tects of the Gal­lery’s ori­gin­al trans­form­a­tion from the former city lib­rary, the darkly min­im­al form is clad in a very unusu­al mater­i­al. Web­grate is nor­mally used for indus­tri­al cat­walks and fences, but here the ribbed and oxid­ised met­al grat­ing forms a screen over the black inner lay­er, cre­at­ing strangely tact­ile effects depend­ing upon the dis­tance and angle of view.