The autumn season of exhibitions opened at Pātaka over the weekend with three new exhibitions that will run through to 6 July.

Lovers & Castaways takes the 1980 book "Contemporary New Zealand Painters" by Jim and Mary Barr as its starting point and focuses on that decade as an important time for art in New Zealand. The exhibition brings together more than 50 works made in the 1980s - and drawn from the Arts House Trust Collection - and highlights what concerns were prominent for artists in that decade. This exhibition features works from well-known artists, including Gretchen Albrecht, Nigel Brown, Tony Fomison, Dick Frizzell and Ralph Hotere.

Hemi Macgregor’s solo exhibition, Waiora, draws on geometric structures, patterns and processes in the natural world to explore our relationship with sky, water, earth and seasons. Working across painting, sculpture and installation, Macgregor’s work looks at the spiritual elements that connect humans to the external worlds of te taiao, te taimoana, te taiwhenua and into tātai tuarangi (the cosmos).

In Toloa Tales, new video works by Tāmaki Makaurau-based artists Edith Amituanai (Aotearoa, Sāmoa) and Sione Tuívailala Monū (Aotearoa, Australia, Tonga) explore what it means to return to an ancestral homeland. In 2023, both artists returned to Samoa - Monū to celebrate a friend participating in the Miss Sāmoa Fa‘afafine Pageant and Amituanai to visit family.

In Toloa Tales, the artists share their own kind of "return" - through personal stories, exchanges and tender moments of everyday life - and examine some of the ways the Pacific diaspora maintain their identity and culture after migration to countries like Aotearoa, Australia and the United States.

Later in the season, Arca Arcade "Round One" opens on 12 April and runs until 22 June.

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