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.