Who Are The Emerging Artists At The 2025 Aotearoa Art Fair?

Nostalgic, constructivist, questioning. These local artists are the next big thing.

When Aotearoa Art Fair returns from May 1-4 thousands of local and international visitors will flock to Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre to peruse curated showings from leading galleries in New Zealand and Australia.

Reflecting the breadth and diversity of the contemporary arts community in Aotearoa, alongside works by venerated artists, the event also spotlights artists who represent the next generation.

Here are 13 to look out for during your visit.

Elliot Love

Dunedin artist Elliot Love’s ability to blend meticulous detail with storytelling has secured his place as a distinctive voice in contemporary New Zealand art. Despite their small scale format, there is often a cinematic quality to his quietly observed urban tableaus depicting cars from the mid-20th century, set within still urban landscapes.

Represented by: Parnell Gallery

Te Whanganui-a-Tara artist Emily Hartley-Skudder is known for her paintings, assemblages and installations that utilise the faux domestic: life-sized dollhouses, carpeted bathrooms, or faded fake fruit to speak to perceptions of taste and class, while highlighting home decoration as a historically appropriate space for women to express their creativity.

Represented by: Jhana Millers Gallery

Jack Hadley

An artist and educator based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Jack Hadley graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts with an MFA in 2020. Hadley’s sculptural practice jumps between contemporary jewellery, furniture design and amateur mechanical engineering, often pairing industrial materials and manufacturing processes with traditional techniques of fine jewellery.

Represented by: Laree Payne Gallery

Jaime Te Heuheu

Based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Jamie Te Heuheu (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) has most recently produced a series of colour field paintings exploring the limits of abstract artmaking, with an emphasis on process and brushwork. The pieces explore how colour, line, texture, and applied processes can stir varying moods and feelings, but leave room for the viewer to bring their own experiences and emotions.

Lucy McMillan

Lucy McMillan’s multidisciplinary studio is built on a foundation of sculptural ceramic objects that ride the line between art and design. Her works are both functional and decorative, taking a composite approach of constructivist sculpture and dusty collections found in natural history museum vitrines, playing out her fascination with artefacts and prehistory.

Represented by: Artor Gallery

Melisa McCleod

Melissa Macleod lives in New Brighton, Christchurch. She is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily across sculpture, photography and performance. She has exhibited in New Zealand and in Japan while on a Creative New Zealand Emergent Artist Grant. Her recent work examines issues surrounding the eastern Christchurch community where she lives, addressing the marginalisation of the area, and responding to environmental impacts.

Represented by: Jonathan Smart Gallery

Molly Timmins

Molly Timmins is a painter based in Tāmaki Makaurau who uses her work to explore gardens as both an environmental physical place, and as a painted subject throughout art history. Taking influence from her Ngāpuhi and Pākehā whakapapa, Timmins’ paintings of endemic foliage consider a nuanced conversation that reference her heritage and navigate the colonial influence over the garden, painting history, and the way in which women have historically existed in these spaces.

Represented by: SANDERSON CONTEMPORARY

Ngaroma Riley

Artist Ngaroma Riley (Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri, Pākehā) began her carving journey while living in Japan by making Buddhist statues. Returning to Auckland in 2020, she completed a Certificate in Whakairo at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. In 2022, she built a storehouse for a sculptural installation at Kaitāia and was shortlisted for the Kingi Tuheitia Portraiture Award.

Known for her karetao (hand-carved puppets) and a love of chainsaws, Ngaroma is also co-founder of Shared Lines Collaborative, an arts collective using art to develop resilience.

Represented by: Season

Nikau Hindin

Nikau Hindin is a Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi and Ngāi Tūpoto barkcloth maker dedicated to reviving and preserving the artistry of aute making in Aotearoa. Her star maps, made using kōkōwai, red earth, are created by blending ancestral knowledge with innovative techniques to produce dynamic, intricate works that honour her Māori heritage while pushing the boundaries of contemporary art. Nikau will be doing her mahi live in the booth at the fair, an opportunity to explore the Māori craftsmanship and its interplay with the modern world.

Represented by: N.Smith Gallery

Rhea Maheshwari

Rhea Maheshwari invites viewers into meditative spaces that challenge conventional understandings of identity and place. Born in Mumbai, Rhea is finding growing prominence in both national and international art scenes for work that weaves together Eastern and Western artistic traditions, and inspirations that traverse 17th- and 18th-century Mughal miniatures, Buddhist and Tantric mandalas, and European Romanticism.

Represented by: Bergman Gallery

Thom Le Noël

An artist working in conceptual and figurative painting, Thom le Noël’s practice deals with the production of politics and the philosophy of representation. Graduating from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2023, Le Noël has since begun an independent painting practice in Tāmaki Makaurau. Recent oil works explore “figurations of dissemblance, a space of personal ruin emanating from 13th-century Christian theology associated with Thomas Aquinas”.

Represented by: Charles Ninow

Tori Beeche

Crafted through a process in which poetic moments from historical image archives are extracted and interlaced with personal memories and imaginings, Beeche’s works often portray a nostalgic longing for her Scandinavian heritage filtered through the lens of a life living and working in Tāhuna, Queenstown.

Represented by: Mothermother

Vishmi Helaratne

An emerging contemporary artist of Sri Lankan descent based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Vishmi Helaratne’s practice combines painting, sculpture, drawing, and culinary methods to create luscious and surprising textures and perspectives in an ongoing exploration of social customs, hospitality, multiculturalism and storytelling. To create their colourful 3D landscapes, blobs, dots, and waves are mixed from moulding paste and pigments, then applied to a flat wooden surface using a piping bag.

Represented by: Foenander Galleries

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