This week, the highly anticipated Aotearoa Art Fair (AAF) returns to Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre. Bringing together more than 50 leading galleries from Aotearoa, Australia, and beyond, the fair offers a snapshot of the current art landscape — spanning painting, sculpture, prints, and ceramics. Set against a waterfront backdrop, it’s where collectors, creatives, and the culturally curious converge. One of the highlights of this year’s programme is the strong presence of female artists who are shaping, challenging, and expanding the visual language of contemporary art. Here, we spotlight six whose work you won’t want to miss.
Lisa Reihana, presented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert
A prominent multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans film, sculpture, costume and body adornment, text, and photography, Lisa Reihana is presenting both within the fair and across the waterfront Sculpture Trail. Her powerful installation titled ‘ANZAC’ is a monumental Māori waharoa (gateway) positioned at the entrance to the Viaduct Events Centre. The work honours Māori soldiers lost in World War II, with kōwhaiwhai and tāniko patterns drawn from a family korowai created to commemorate Ngāpuhi servicemen. Standing eight metres tall, the installation is composed of more than 180,000 shimmering plates that move with the wind, creating a striking and deeply resonant welcome to the fair.
Marion Borgelt, presented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert
With a career spanning more than four decades, Australian artist Marion Borgelt is one you won’t want to miss. Known for her two and three-dimensional works, Borgelt’s practice is grounded in repetition, geometry, and ritual. Exploring universal themes of life cycles, cosmology, optics, and phenomenology, she creates highly crafted, visually striking pieces using a diverse range of materials — from beeswax and linen to felt, glass, pigment, stainless steel, wood, stone, and organic matter.
Jess Swney, presented by Föenander
Working primarily with textiles as both a material and conceptual tool, Jess Swney is best known for her tufted rug “paintings”, where restrained palettes and tactile surfaces explore memory, place, and perception through subtle shifts in texture and form. Rooted in a traditionally female-coded craft history, Swney’s work both honours and challenges the medium — using fabric to navigate the complexities of being a young woman within contemporary society. Her pieces draw on lived experience, with colour, texture, and form used to evoke emotion rather than depict literal scenes. The result is a delicate balance of beauty and tension, reflecting both personal and collective narratives.
Ashleigh Taupaki, presented by Plomacy
Ashleigh Taupaki is a Tāmaki Makaurau–based artist working across object, drawing, and research-led practice. For the Aotearoa Art Fair, she presents a series of cyanotypes featuring Roman numerals drawn from legislative texts, shown alongside drawings that extend the conceptual framework of her work. Together, these pieces continue her exploration of whakapapa and contemporary Māori form, tracing the intersections between systems of knowledge, identity, and visual language.
Caitlin Devoy, presented by Jhana Millers Gallery
Featured in the expanded Sculpture Trail, Caitlin Devoy’s large-scale work ‘Benthic Lung’, a striking response to oceanic pollution. Reframing the diver’s tank as an interface “within a liquid economy of objects, images, and bodies”, the semi-translucent form is filled with everyday items — resembling what the artist describes as “circuits of junk”, where desire, waste, and identity collapse into one another.
Lucienne O’Mara, presented by Fox Jensen McCrory
The Aotearoa Art Fair marks the first presentation of British artist Lucienne O’Mara’s work in Aotearoa. Known for her abstract compositions that blend freehand geometry with expressive brushwork, O’Mara’s art is deeply shaped by personal experience; her practice took on new meaning following a brain injury in 2017 that affected her sight. Forced to relearn how to “see”, O’Mara transforms uncertainty into a powerful visual language.
