Gregory Smith: Behind These Walls - Auckland’s Modernist Murals

Lost Property introduces Gregory Smith‘s Behind These Walls – Auckland’s Modernist Murals exhibition, opening in the Verge Gallery at Depot ArtSpace, as part of the Auckland Heritage Festival. The exhibition will showcase a brief history which reveals some of the vast collection of works that adorned this city’s walls, and some that still do – although often hidden!

Artist James Turkington has been credited with painting the city’s first mural in an Auckland coffee house around 1920 upon his return from service in Egypt and France. Although long gone, the Rimmer’s mural would become a part of an era which only recently has been recognised as a definitive period in this country’s cultural history.

The modernist-era mural works of artists such as Milan Mrkusich, Turkington, Russell Clark, John Holmwood, Theo Schoon, Molly Macalister, Dennis Knight-Turner, David Barker, May Smith and many others have more than often been destroyed due to being a part of a building no longer deemed fashionable or usable. They were also seen as being ‘commercial’ or ‘lesser art’, a decorative overlay rather than part of the artists’ oeuvre or the structure of building.

The exhibition will contain historical and contemporary images, biographic histories of a number of important artists and works, as well as a timeline and guide to Auckland’s modernist murals.

Opening date is Saturday 19 September at 3.30pm. For more information see the Depot ArtSpace website. For other events and activities associated with the Auckland Heritage Festival, see here.