In 2018, Sandro Kopp was tasked by film director Wes Anderson with creating ten monumental paintings for the film The French Dispatch in less than three months. 

Kopp’s works needed to look like the work of a singular genius (the fictional “criminally insane” artist Moses Rosenthaler, played by Benicio Del Toro) who had created the work while imprisoned over three years. 

No pressure then! The Rosenthal Paintings is a project Kopp has described as the most challenging and satisfying project of his career thus far.

A well known arts critic, historian and commentator, Andrew Paul Wood in Timaru fills us in on ‘drama’ around the Timaru Theatre Royal redevelopment, which includes a new venue for South Canterbury Museum and some functions of the Aigantighe Art Gallery - one of the South Island’s most significant public galleries.

What would a map that represents a more distinct lived human cultural perspective look like? That has been the very personal question for Icao Tiseli with her award-winning project Mapping the Wheke.

At the end of 2023, the Tongan-born Tāmaki Makaurau-based associate at architecture firm Jasmax was named one of six winners for the project at Archiprix International, a biennial competition that looks to showcase the new generation of the world's best architects and urbanists. She travelled to Rotterdam with other finalists to workshop ideas for assisting the rebuild of Ukraine.

It’s the 96th Academy Awards on Monday 11th March - the final ceremony of the awards season which started almost a year ago at the Cannes Film Festival.

The true story behind theatre show Boy is both controversial and compelling. Appearing at the Auckland Arts Festival theatre and written by Dutch-born, Netherlands-based playwright Carly Wijs (Us/Them) is based on the life of twins, Bruce and Brian Reimer born in Canada in 1966.

Ōtepoti Dunedin’s Robert Scott is best known as a member of seminal New Zealand bands The Bats and The Clean, but more quietly he’s been painting for decades with work appearing in both exhibitions and on album covers. These days he also co-runs Port Chalmers gallery Pea Sea Art.  

On Friday, an exhibition devoted to the art of Scott’s late Clean bandmate Hamish Kilgour, I Go Side On opened at Pūmanawa, The Arts Centre in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

News from Aotearoa and abroad

Berlin-based New Zealand artist Simon Denny’s work has long explored the culture of new technology and the dreams tech entrepreneurs sell us.   

Back in 2016, Denny was one of the first artists to look at the complex politics behind  blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. His work has looked critically at the boom and bust of the NFT (or non-fungible token) as a way of creating ownership of digital art.

Artists in Tauranga recently took a creative response to comment on the City Council's Long Term Plan, which proposes steep rental increases for community groups, and a 'user pays' approach to charging for access to community spaces.

At the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Pōneke hangs an enormous New Zealand flag upon which artist Richard Lewer has painted the words: “To have a future I must reconcile with MY past.” 

Lewer’s exhibition What they didn’t teach me at school about the Waikato Wars has been his most difficult project, he tells Culture 101’s Mark Amery.