If you’re craving something new and inspiring for your walls, consider work from these ten exciting up-and-coming artists making waves across the city’s vibrant art scene. From immersive paintings to textured sculptures, these creatives are breathing new life into contemporary practice with fresh perspectives and bold voices. With works available at some of the city’s most notable galleries, now’s the perfect time to familiarise yourself with their work — and perhaps add something exceptional to your collection.
Andrea Bolima
Gallery: Föenander Galleries
Andrea Bolima’s canvases hum with feeling as her dreamy, emotive works drift between abstraction and landscape without ever settling. Colour leads the way, built up in intuitive, spontaneous gestures that evoke gardens, cloudscapes, or half-remembered places. Inspired by memory and the natural world, Bolima’s paintings invite personal reflection, offering glimpses of the familiar without spelling anything out. The artist’s recent exhibitions have cemented her as one to watch — bringing softness, fluidity, and painterly joy to the contemporary scene.
Molly Timmins
Gallery: Sanderson
Molly Timmins’ paintings are lush, layered explorations of heritage, femininity, and the garden as both place and symbol. Drawing from her Ngāpuhi and Pākehā whakapapa, Timmins centralises bold, gestural brushwork, creating textured works that feel both wild and intimate. Her practice moves between personal memory and wider histories of colonisation and women’s spaces in Aotearoa. With recent shows like Rewilding the Garden and early career acclaim, Timmins brings a fresh, richly thoughtful voice to the local landscape.
Yafeng Duan
Gallery: Gow Langsford
Yafeng Duan brings a captivating interplay of East and West to contemporary abstraction. Born in Hebei, China, and now based in Berlin, her large-scale works blend the lyrical flow of traditional Chinese ink painting with the bold energy of Western abstract expressionism. Layers of colour and gestural mark-making create meditative spaces that explore rhythm, duality, and transformation. Recently welcomed to Aotearoa by Gow Langsford Gallery, Duan’s debut Illuminations (2024) signalled her rising presence here — delivering expressive, soul-stirring works that feel at once timeless and strikingly fresh.
Peter Collis
Gallery: Black Door Gallery
150-300mm Diameter (Various Shapes, sizes and designs available)
With a career spanning over four decades, Peter Collis is a master of form, surface, and light. His Lustre series distills this mastery into mesmerising wall-mounted ceramics, glazed in 22ct gold, platinum, and titanium. Minimal in shape yet rich in reflection, these circular works respond to light and movement — glowing, shifting, and changing as you pass by. Rooted in both local landscapes and global ceramic traditions, Collis’ work is quietly dramatic, offering a timeless, meditative presence that feels as much about atmosphere as it is about craftsmanship.
Jess Swney
Gallery: Föenander Galleries
Blurring the lines between painting and textile, Jess Swney’s tufted rug works, despite their softness, are sharp in their intent. Using fabric as both critique and comfort, Swney explores themes of self-discovery, vulnerability, and the quiet negotiations women make within social spaces. Her abstract forms emerge from memory and experience, playing with colour, texture, and tone to evoke emotion without overt narrative. Rooted in feminist materiality, her works reclaim the decorative as powerful — unpacking cultural histories while offering intimate, tactile reflections on identity, expectation, and strength.
Elliot Love
Gallery: Parnell Gallery
Love’s paintings capture the stillness of suburbia with a quietly cinematic edge. Working in oil and acrylic, often at intimate scales, his scenes of parked cars and empty streets feel like fleeting moments paused in time. Love’s own beloved Mazda 323 makes regular appearances, but it’s never just about the car — his works explore nostalgia, urban isolation, and the unnoticed rhythms of everyday life. With sold-out shows and a growing collector following, the artist’s moody, beautifully observed works turn the mundane into something quietly magnetic and deeply reflective.
Grace Wright
Gallery: Gow Langsford
Known for her vast, swirling canvases, Grace Wright creates immersive works that pulse with energy and movement. Her coiled brushstrokes evoke natural rhythms while nodding to the grandeur of baroque painting. Balancing harmonious colour with visceral power, Wright’s work feels both fierce and feminine, transforming abstraction into something bodily and transcendent. With sell-out shows and international momentum, Wright’s monumental pieces invite you to stand still, look up, and feel. A rising star with serious force behind her.
Antonia Perricone-Mrljak
Gallery: FHE Galleries
Antonia Perricone-Mrljak paints with memory in motion — her expressive, gestural canvases inviting personal reflection through layered colour and mark-making. Rooted in her Italian heritage and shaped by the landscapes of Aotearoa, Mrljak’s work blurs the line between painting and drawing, creating rhythmic, emotionally charged surfaces. Her first solo show sold out entirely, and with upcoming presentations in Sydney, her star is firmly on the rise.
Vishmi Helaratne
Gallery: Föenander Galleries
Vishmi Helaratne’s vibrant, textural works celebrate culture, memory, and the beauty of hybridity. Drawing on their Sri Lankan heritage and background in cooking, Helaratne transforms painting into a sensory experience — think piping bags, blobs of colour, and sculptural layers that feel as joyful as they are intricate. Their playful, deeply personal works touch on family, food, spirituality, and identity, blurring lines between art, performance, and hospitality. With a growing list of shows across Aotearoa and Australia, Helaratne is very much one to watch — bringing colour, connection, and storytelling to the fore.
Cruz Jimenez
Gallery: Black Door Gallery
Cruz Jimenez paints at the threshold of memory and atmosphere, creating luminous, abstract works that hum with quiet energy. Originally from California, now long based in Auckland, Jimenez draws from his Mexican heritage and the natural world — evoking celestial pull, ancestral memory, and unseen forces. Using oil and wax, his pieces feel both grounded and cosmic, rich with texture and movement. Trained in colour theory at Parsons, Jimenez balances technical precision with emotional depth, offering meditative works that shift between painting and sculpture, inviting reflective pause.
