Image: Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Dunedin Public Art Gallery is showing 'From Behind' by Imogen Taylor, a presentation of new and recent paintings that engages with modernist art history, identity, power and queer desire. The exhibition runs from 2 May to 13 September 2026 at Dunedin Public Art Gallery in Dunedin, New Zealand.
According to the gallery, the works in 'From Behind' play with the space between abstraction and representation, and consider what it means to paint in the wake of histories and places that lie behind and before the present. Taylor’s paintings are described as deliberately unsettled, asking viewers to reconsider what they are looking at and where they are looking from.
The exhibition statement says Taylor has spent much of the past decade interrogating the legacies of modernist painting that shaped settler-colonial New Zealand. Working from the position of a Pākehā painter, she looks back at that history while challenging the artifice and restrictions of its colonial framing devices. The gallery also says the project is laced with humour and continues Taylor’s exploration of positionality, power dynamics and queer desire.
The works in 'From Behind' were created over the past four years in Aotearoa and in London, where Taylor has lived since 2024. The gallery says the paintings push back against dominant social, cultural and sexual politics encoded within formal abstraction, and that Taylor uses fragmentation, contradiction and altered spatial relationships to unsettle fixed ways of seeing.
City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi is credited as the venue for the exhibition’s curatorial development, with Dr Kirsty Baker named as curator. Dunedin Public Art Gallery notes that the exhibition will be shown in Dunedin in 2026 before a later presentation at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi in early 2027.
The gallery’s current exhibitions listing places 'From Behind' alongside several other presentations, but Taylor’s show is dated separately and listed for the main gallery from 2 May to 13 September 2026. The exhibition page presents it as a focused group of recent paintings that do not offer a stable point of view, instead asking viewers to navigate their own frames of reference.
