Séraphine Pick's original and imaginative practice has made her one of New Zealand's most highly regarded painters. Over the course of her thirty-year career, she has investigated the nuances of human experience through figuration and abstraction. Working to her own style of off-beat and hazy surrealism, which combines atmospheric dreamscapes with conventions of traditional portraiture, Pick produces characteristically ethereal compositions in a range of media including oil, watercolour, smoke and ceramics. Often turning to the internet for source imagery in an attempt to study the nature of human behaviour, Pick is drawn to subjects in states of ambiguity, transfiguration and transcendence.

Séraphine Pick is widely regarded as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant painters and was recently named a 2025 Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate. In 2024, she presented a significant solo exhibition Rider’s Instinct at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland. Pick has also been the subject of two major survey exhibitions, Séraphine Pick: Tell Me More, organised and toured by the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (2009–10); and White Noise, at the Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt (2015). Pick was a Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin (1999); received the Rita Angus Cottage Residency, Wellington (1995); and Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation Art Award (1994). Pick is represented in significant public collections including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

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