Jamie Te Heuheu 

West of the Sun is the first major solo exhibition in Australia by New Zealand artist Jamie Te Heuheu (Ngāti Tūwharetoa). Across a suite of new paintings, Te Heuheu explores land, sea, and memory, where layers of colour, subtle shifts in tone, and careful modulation of surface create a quiet intensity. 

Gestural yet meticulous, meditative yet structured, Te Heuheu’s work evokes both the vastness of the ocean and the unfolding rhythm and repetition of jazz phrasing. Surfaces breathe, ever ebbing and flowing, constant yet never still. Inflections return, alter, and deepen, and time becomes tangible. These sensibilities underpin Te Heuheu’s practice, emerging through a slow, attentive form of looking – where monochrome becomes both vessel and mirror, reflecting an expansiveness and a gradual unfolding of presence.

Bowed brushstrokes shimmer under light like waves catching the sun: small movement building a cadence within the composition, overlapping and never quite the same. Measured and immersive, revealing their depth through patient observation, West of the Sun offers an emotive landscape shaped by memory, rhythm, and place, where experience is felt as much as it is seen.