An enormous hand-sculpted rock carving in France nearly six years in the making could be the largest work of Maori art in the Northern Hemisphere.

A giant photograph of state houses described as "strikingly ordinary" has won the National Contemporary Art Award, and a faded old curtain was also recognised.

Watch a selection of artists and their works from this week's Auckland Art Fair.

The Auckland Art Fair runs from Wednesday to Sunday at The Cloud. More details here.

If a public art gallery comes to reflect something of the style of its director, what might the Auckland Art Gallery look like after a few years of its new director, Rhana Devenport, running the place?

Artist Gabriel White got stopped by the police while filming Oracle Drive, his leisurely one-hour ode to the poetic meanings of Albany (yes, Albany).

"I placed the suitcase containing the paintings in the stove." The mum of an art heist suspect says she "destroyed any evidence" - quite permanently.

'I liberate photographic fragments from their original snap-and-capture setting and reposition them in the space of art," is Peter Madden's description of how he arrives at his fascinating collages at the Ivan Anthony Gallery.