City Gallery to reopen with a bang with major Cornelia Parker exhibition

Friday, 7 November 2025

Wellington’s City Gallery will reopen in October next year with a major new exhibition of artworks by the inventive British conceptual artist Cornelia Parker, who’s known for her large-scale, immersive installations and sculptures.

Parker’s mesmerising, dramatic work often features found objects that she transforms and gives new meaning to through destruction, crushing and/or suspension ‒ for example a garden shed which she had the British Army explode, or artworks created with gunpowder.

Her body of work explores the potential of materials, violence, climate change, world politics, the human experience, memory and beliefs.

City Gallery Te Whare Toi is Wellington’s pre-eminent public gallery excluding Te Papa, but it has been closed since July last year while the city council has been proceeding with construction work in the Civic Square precinct that it’s located in.

Since the closure contractors have been strengthening the gallery, and doing other upgrades, after a report last year revealed it was vulnerable to a quake. Other changes include the removal of its floating ceilings, which mean it will be able to display large works like Parker’s more easily, and improvements made to its air conditioning system.

“[Cornelia Parker] is one of the most consistently inventive artists I know. There is a real sense of magic and wonder to her installations. I think it’s this experiential quality of her work that makes it so beguiling,” said Andrea Schlieker, the exhibition’s co-curator and the former director of exhibitions and displays at London’s Tate Britain, which held a retrospective of Parker’s work in 2022.

The City Gallery show will include some of Parker’s celebrated signature works on loan from the Tate collection, including the early, room-filling installation Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988) and the extraordinary Cold Dark Matter (1991), otherwise known as the exploded shed.

New, never-before-seen works will also be displayed, including a 2023 film The Future featuring schoolchildren talking about their visions for the future; and Parker’s Stolen Thunder (A Storm Gathering) sound installation that features a lone light bulb hanging from the ceiling alongside 12 loudspeakers that envelop visitors in a soundscape of rain and thunder.

Also to be shown is a new, room-filling installation PsychoBarn (Cut Up) (2023) that references the Bates Motel of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho; some of the artist’s recent photogravures; plus a series of her first abstract paintings that were made using fossilised dinosaur excrement, which have never been shown in a museum previously.

An eerie, quietly unsettling 2010 film installation Parker created during a previous New Zealand residency entitled Doubtful Sound, will also be screened.

“The thing I hear the most in my role is, ‘I miss City Gallery’, and Wellingtonians tell me they miss going to the gallery in Te Ngākau all the time,” said Charlotte Davy, City Gallery’s director of art, who has followed Parker’s career for 20 years.

Davy described the artist’s work as accessible, humorous, hopeful, surprising, and also serious.

It was a deliberate choice to invite Parker and her transformative works to be the opening show, with the gallery having been on its own journey of change, she said.

“It was a no-brainer to ask her to come at a time when the city was trying to rebuild itself … People go through these cycles, and I think cities do, too. Wellington has been through that a couple of times in my lifetime, and this time it’s been a very tough period.

“The role of beauty and inspiration in renewal is like spring. The flowers come and your mood lifts. Cornelia’s work is the same ‒ you come through those processes of destruction and come out into a new space, new thinking and new energy. There is a very direct parallel with what is happening in our city ‒ renewal is happening.”

The exhibition is the latest in City Gallery’s series of major exhibitions of outstanding women artists including Yayoi Kusama, Cindy Sherman and Hilma af Klint.

Until next year City Gallery will continue to present satellite exhibitions in other venues across the region.

– Exhibition runs October 10, 2026 to March 7, 2027. Tickets available December 2025.