Home at last
Objectspace’s new gallery by Richard Naish
A new gallery designed by Richard Naish means exciting opportunities for a designfocused exhibition space.
At the end of July, Auckland’s Objectspace reopens to the public in a fine new building. Its opening show is a good one: the local debut of the New Zealand Institute of Architects’ ‘Future Islands’, from the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.
It’s the end of a year-long, $1-million fundraising drive, which has delivered the new building – by RTA Studio’s Richard Naish – in quick-smart time. The expanded footprint, with three gallery spaces, takes in architecture, design, craft and the applied arts. “It’s completely thrilling – there are so many possibilities, but it’s also reasonably terrifying,” says director Kim Paton.
In 2015, the gallery secured major funding from Creative New Zealand, which catapulted it onto a level footing with national galleries, enabling it to establish a new home, which it found in a 1980s industrial building on a Ponsonby back street.
“It sort of reminded me of the Saatchi Gallery in London as it was in the 1990s,” says Naish, whose first presentation referenced Bill Culbert and Donald Judd. “It’s nothing like that building but had the same idea of taking a warehouse space and adapting it to a gallery.”
The dream? To become New Zealand’s design museum. “We’ve had a series of shows with small objects at the scale that you could hold in your hand,” says Paton. “Now there’s going to be a new imperative, which is about spatial design.”
One thing won’t change: the intimacy of the small gallery and its wide-ranging, unpretentious appeal. “When I started I noticed there was a sense in which people walked in, and quite quickly they could find their own language for what they were looking at,” says Paton. “In a particular kind of way, these are objects that are much closer to the world we live in.”
HOME is proud to support this exciting new design endeavour.
Objectspace 13 Rose Road, Ponsonby, Auckland objectspace.org.nz