Imogen Taylor exhibition talk

Opening Weekend Talk Imogen Taylor: From Behind

A talk featuring artist Imogen Taylor and curator Dr Kirsty Baker, from City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, on the opening weekend of the exhibition From Behind.

From Behind brings together new and recent paintings by Imogen Taylor, which playfully engage with the weight of art's histories. Turning her brush to the tenuous space between abstraction and representation, Taylor considers what it means to paint in the wake of the histories and the places that lie behind us.

The exhibition will be presented at Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2026 before its display at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi in early 2027.

FREE 11am Saturday 2 May

Imogen Taylor was born in Whangārei, Aotearoa and currently resides in London. Taylor earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts in 2007, later completing a Post-Graduate Diploma of Fine Arts in 2010. Through geometric painted abstractions, Taylor engages the LGBTQIA+ legacies of modernism in Aotearoa and beyond, while critically satirising Pākehā national identity tropes within the New Zealand male painting canon.

Taylor regularly exhibits with Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, alongside exhibitions throughout New Zealand and internationally. Notable accolades include being awarded a 6-month residency at the ISCP in New York in 2020, as well as being the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at Otago University in 2019, and the McCahon House residency in 2017.

Dr Kirsty Baker is a writer, art historian and curator of contemporary art. She is based in Te Whanganui a Tara where she works as a curator at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. Her writing on art has been published in a wide range of publications, including Art New Zealand, The Big Idea, Artist Profile, Art and Australia and The Pantograph Punch. Her award-winning book Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa was published by Auckland University Press in 2024. 

Some of her recent curatorial projects include Cora Allan: Recording Mauri, Moments of Light and Earth (2026), Site Seeing (2025), Memory Lines (2024), Ngahuia Harrison: Coastal Cannibals (2024), Archive: Alter / Image (2024), Stella Brennan: Ancestor Technologies (2023) and Ana Iti: I must shroud myself in a stinging nettle (2022).

[image: Imogen Taylor From Behind 2026. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Lett Thomas, Auckland. Photography by B J Deakin.]