Sarah Hopkinson and Harry Cundy are the proud owners of K Rd's newest gallery space.
Hopkinson Cundy is a new contemporary art gallery, located in a historic building near K Road (the George Court Department Store on Cross St, to be exact). Directed by Sarah Hopkinson and Harry Cundy, the gallery opened in November. Both have creative backgrounds: Hopkinson was the gallery manager at Michael Lett for over two years and a founding member of Gambia Castle, and Cundy has performed with bands including the Brunettes and the Ruby Suns - but is soon to graduate with a law degree.
The pair represents a strong stable of young artists through the gallery, including Kate Newby, Nick Austin, Nicholas Mangan, Fiona Connor and Andrew Barber - who currently has new pieces on canvas as part of his exhibition Studies, on at the gallery until January 29.
Here, Hopkinson and Cundy reflect on their favourite things.
10 FAVOURITE THINGS
1. John Waters' top 10 films in Artforum
We wish we could come up with a top 10 as profound as those by the Pope of Trash in Artforum every year. Vicky Cristina Barcelona never seemed so appealing.
2. The Hopkinson Cundy desk
This desk, along with almost everything else in the gallery, was built for us by the irrepressible David Kisler. It is based on a prototypical Donald Judd design from the 50s, in our favourite Eurolight poplar ply.
3. Miss Crabb
Sarah wishes she had Kristine Crabb's style, so compensates by wearing her clothes as much as possible. We love the amazing flowing silk dresses released during Kristine's pregnancies - it wasn't until she went back to slim lines that we realised half of Auckland had unconsciously been in impossibly elegant maternity wear for three seasons.
4. Hany Armanious hooks and soap holder
Hany made us these when Sarah worked at Michael Lett. Cast in pewter from tree branches, like all of Hany's objects they are curiously beautiful and a little mischievous (sort of like Hany himself, actually). One piece holds our soap and the other occasionally pokes unsuspecting visitors in the forehead when they use the sink.
5. Kate Newby seat
Kate made us this seat, titled You're in this somewhere, for the Hopkinson Cundy office. Everything [that's] great about Kate's practice - her alchemy of colour and materials, and her insistence on difficulty - now lives by our bookshelf. It makes other chairs look like wimps...
6. Wouter Scheublin Frame Chair
... except this chair by Dutch designer Wouter Scheublin for Established & Sons, bought from Simon James Design in Newton. It looks simple and complicated and new and old, all at the same time.
7. Nick Austin, Untitled (band-aid), 2007
Acutely modest and perversely fragile, this painting on newspaper looks like two small, flesh-coloured Band Aids trying to hold together cracks in a pavement. We feel the same way about Nick Austin as John Waters feels about Richard Tuttle - we like to imagine how the artist must feel when he realises a work like this is finished.
8. Gossip Girl
We love this show that makes us feel so inferior for not living on the Upper East Side. But the characters aren't just impossibly good-looking congealments of economic and social capital - they are teenagers too. We wait in feverish anticipation for the latest hook-ups and takedowns.
9. Isabelle Graw's High Price
We bought this book from our friends at World Food Books in Melbourne, published by the impeccable Berlin/New York publishers Sternberg Press. Graw's writing is concise, critical and sometimes a little caustic. It is everything you need to know about the art business and the thorny relationship between art's symbolic and market values.
10. D.O.C
This is the only bar we drink at - apart from the rare but special nights we end up at Auckland's greatest Korean R&B super club, the Sixth Sense.
