Parnell Gallery

Parnell Gallery Dealers & consultants in original New Zealand art.

Colour and light are central to Neil Driver's practice. His palette is closely observed and grounded in the visible worl...
04/06/2026

Colour and light are central to Neil Driver's practice. His palette is closely observed and grounded in the visible world, while also working compositionally to shape atmosphere, depth, and emotional resonance. Light is treated with equal sensitivity, shifting across surfaces and through space to create moments of clarity, reflection, and tonal nuance. Together, they give his paintings a heightened sense of atmosphere that remains closely tied to observation while extending beyond it into perception and feeling.

Driver's work rewards attentive viewing, where detail and nuance are held in mind long after moving away from the painting.

Neil Driver's new solo exhibition opens next Thursday, 11 June, and will be on view until 25 June.

View all paintings now by clicking the following link and contact the gallery with enquiries - https://www.parnellgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/neil-driver-2026/

28/05/2026

Upcoming Exhibition: Neil Driver | 11 - 25 June

We are delighted to announce an upcoming solo exhibition for contemporary Aotearoa painter Neil Driver.

Based in the South Island's picturesque Clyde, Driver

creates paintings that are defined by a strong sense of materiality and attentiveness, where ordinary objects and settings are rendered with tactile sensitivity and compositional care.

Through a balance of traditional and contemporary approaches, he sensitively guides the observer toward details that might otherwise be overlooked: the richness of everyday surfaces and objects, the way light settles across interior spaces, and the subtle material presence of familiar domestic environments and objects.

Although figures are absent, a persistent sense of human presence remains, suggested through arrangement, surface, and the inclusion of architectural features.

Each work in this collection arrives in a frame, hand-crafted and painted by Driver himself; a considered extension of the same attentiveness that defines his practice.

Neil Driver's new solo exhibition opens on 11 June and will run until 25 June. View all paintings online now by clicking the following link and contact the gallery with enquiries - https://www.parnellgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/neil-driver-2026/

Each fold holds a decision, each repetition a layer of depth. Liz Sofield’s practice exists between control and surrende...
21/05/2026

Each fold holds a decision, each repetition a layer of depth. Liz Sofield’s practice exists between control and surrender, where rhythm becomes a form of thinking and making, a way of slowing time.

Working with hand-folded paper and pigments drawn from the natural world, Sofield creates surfaces that feel both structured and soft. What appears minimal at first reveals a deep accumulation of gesture, patience, and intent.

Her palette is grounded in place, shaped by naturally derived pigments and materials found on the coasts of Brisbane and Whangārei. These subtle tonal shifts carry a sense of memory and landscape.

After two decades living in Australia, Sofield has returned home to Aotearoa, establishing her studio along the coast of Whangārei Heads, where her work reflects a renewed connection to the coastal environment that surrounds her.

To view the artwork in full, follow this link - https://www.parnellgallery.co.nz/artists/liz-sofield/

19/05/2026

In Sara Langdon’s ‘Love Letters’, everything feels intimate. These works draw you in close, inviting you to slow down and be present within Langdon’s vision of the landscape.

Accompanying each piece is a handwritten letter, sealed and unseen. Referencing the intimacy and ephemerality of letter writing, each letter is addressed directly to its eventual recipient, remaining closed until it finds its way home.

With the letters extending the work beyond a visual language, each work as a whole becomes something held in waiting, a work that continues to unfold over time; a private exchange between artist and collector, between the work and its recipient.

Sara Langdon’s latest suite of works is now available by contacting the gallery or viewing online by clicking the link in our bio.

In 'Love Letters', Sara Langdon draws her practice inward, working at a smaller scale to explore a more intimate, person...
17/05/2026

In 'Love Letters', Sara Langdon draws her practice inward, working at a smaller scale to explore a more intimate, personal relationship with place. These works settle into something more enclosed; secluded, internally attentive, and deeply felt.

Rendered on fine parchment, the paintings focus on intimate passages of the landscape: stands of bush, the fall of shadow, and light moving through canopies, with depth gently unfolding beyond. Space is held, then released through light and detail; forms are carefully articulated, creating a subtle tension between darkness and illumination, closeness, and depth.

Each work is framed beneath glass, its layered presentation echoing this interplay of distance and intimacy. They feel both contained and open, like something carefully kept; keepsakes that hold both a place and the experience of it.

Accompanying each painting is a handwritten letter, sealed and unseen. Addressed to the eventual recipient, these letters remain closed until received, extending the work beyond the visual into a space of quiet, unfolding connection.

Across 'Love Letters', Langdon gives form to an emotional connection to place, translating fleeting, internal experience into something tangible. This body of work draws us close, into moments of stillness and recognition, revealing the enduring resonance of what is most deeply felt.

A small, deeply felt body of work, now available by contacting the gallery or viewing online by clicking the following link - https://www.parnellgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/sara-langdon-2026/

Sara Langdon Art

In 'The Switch House', Zoë Marsden continues her engagement with encountered buildings that sit outside of their active ...
13/05/2026

In 'The Switch House', Zoë Marsden continues her engagement with encountered buildings that sit outside of their active use, reworked in the studio to shift context and emotional register. The painting draws on a process of reimagining place, where architecture becomes a starting point for atmosphere, memory, and dislocation.

Here, the solitary, front-facing switch house is held within a reflective ground, its mirrored surface subtly doubling the form. Marsden’s vision of such buildings, often isolated, utilitarian, and unremarkable, offers a sense of transformation through painting, becoming sites of suggestion and psychological weight.

Titles remain deliberately understated, withholding geographic specificity and allowing space for interpretation to form around mood rather than location.

Rendered in oil on birch panel, the work reflects her ongoing attention to buildings that have fallen out of function, and the shifts that occur when they are re-situated through painting into new narrative and emotional terrain.

Zoë Marsden
'The Switch House'
Oil on Birch Panel
530 x 530 mm

Click the following link for full details on this painting - https://www.parnellgallery.co.nz/shop/zoe-marsden-the-switch-house/

A gallery moment where scale meets structure in this striking pairing. 'Two Carp for Shelley' by Peter Hackett becomes a...
12/05/2026

A gallery moment where scale meets structure in this striking pairing. 'Two Carp for Shelley' by Peter Hackett becomes an immersive meditation on water, built through richly layered impasto oils. The surface holds movement and stillness at once; reflections shifting, lily pads drifting, paint rising and settling across the canvas. The carp emerge beneath the surface, anchoring the composition and deepening the work’s atmosphere of calm and gentle presence.

In contrast, Richard Landers’ glass work, 'Tower Gate' exudes a clarity and rhythm of line and form. Its vertical planes catch and refract the surrounding light, offering a dynamic architectural counterpoint to Hackett’s fluid materiality.

View both of these artworks on our website now or DM us and we can send you links to your inbox.

Some buildings gently hold a lifetime of memories.For painter, Robert Scriven, The Northern Club is one of them. First e...
30/04/2026

Some buildings gently hold a lifetime of memories.

For painter, Robert Scriven, The Northern Club is one of them. First encountered as a teenager during school holidays spent working nearby, it became a place he would return to often, pausing to take in the building’s façade wrapped in ficus and the tactile sense of history it carries.

Over the years, photographs were taken across seasons, capturing the shifting character of the iconic structure and its botanical veil. From the starkness of winter to the first promise of spring, the fullness of summer and the gentle wane into autumn, the building became a kind of living study; a reflection on time, change, and continuity.

This painting brings those moments together. Referencing the myriad of photographs Scriven had taken, it weaves different stages of the ficus' colourful cycle into a single composition, created in oil on board. Fresh, lush greens sit alongside leaves in their final autumnal transition, while the underlying lattice of branches remains visible, grounding the composition. Scriven works in oil on board, cutting and shaping the edges of his surfaces to match the contours of his subject. Here, each leaf and underlying branch is rendered and formed in astonishing detail.

Titled after the building, 'Northern Club Ficus' is composed in vertical bias, echoing how we might naturally encounter such architecture. Standing close, looking up, taking it all in.

The painting offers a subtle meditation on cycles, memory, and, as the artist describes it, “a certain kind of magic.”

Robert Scriven
'Northern Club Ficus'
Oil on Board
1540 x 925 mm

View full details of this artwork by clicking the following link - https://www.parnellgallery.co.nz/shop/robert-scriven-northern-club-ficus/

Stephen Howard’s latest body of work continues his exploration of light as both subject and material, presenting a serie...
27/04/2026

Stephen Howard’s latest body of work continues his exploration of light as both subject and material, presenting a series of luminous, distilled landscapes that sit at the intersection of perception and memory. Working in oil on board, Howard constructs environments that feel at once familiar and intangible; spaces shaped less by description than by sensation.

In these new paintings, light is not simply observed but activated. It arcs, diffuses, and settles across the surface, animating softened forms and subtly shifting planes. Colour emerges in prismatic passages; fleeting and atmospheric, suggesting geological formations, weather systems, or distant horizons without fully resolving into place. Edges dissolve, forms bend, and space opens outward, creating a sense of movement held in suspension.

Grounded in a deep sensitivity to the natural world, Howard’s practice resists direct representation. Instead, it distils the experience of landscape through memory and duration, holding stillness and transition in delicate balance. The paintings appear to contain their own internal luminosity, as if illuminated from within, inviting a slower, more contemplative mode of looking.

This suite of paintings extends Howard’s long-standing inquiry into the conditions that shape our experience of place. Each painting becomes an encounter with atmosphere; a shift in light, a moment at the edge of change, offering a space where perception itself comes into focus.

To view this new suite of works, please click the link in our bio now.

04/02/2026

Lingering in the shifting light and layered forms of Greer Clayton’s ‘Blue Shade Day’. Through her use of a restrained, cool palette of soft blues and greys in muted tones, Clayton describes the sense of a familiar landscape without ever fully defining it; instead, she captures an atmospheric stillness that draws us into her sublime vision of the natural world.

Greer Clayton
‘Blue Shade Day’
Acrylic on Canvas
1035 x 1425 mm

To view further details about this painting, click the link in our bio. For enquiries contact the gallery on [email protected]

Address

263 Parnell Road, Parnell
Auckland
1052

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 5:30pm
Tuesday 10am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 10am - 5:30pm
Thursday 10am - 5:30pm
Friday 10am - 5:30pm
Saturday 10am - 4pm
Sunday 11am - 4pm

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+6493773133

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