From behind brings together new and recent paintings by Imogen Taylor, which playfully engage with the weight of art's histories. Turning her brush to the tenuous space between abstraction and representation, Taylor considers what it means to paint in the wake of the histories and the places that lie behind – and before – us.

Over the previous decade, much of Taylor’s work has been concerned with an interrogation of the legacies of modernist painting that have shaped settler-colonial New Zealand. From her position as a Pākehā painter, Taylor looks back at this art history, while challenging the artifice and restrictions of its colonial framing devices. Laced with humour, From behind continues this exploration, considering ideas of positionality, power dynamics and queer desire.

Created over the past four years, the paintings brought together here were made in both Aotearoa and in London, where Taylor has been living since 2024. These paintings push back against the dominant social, cultural, and sexual politics that have been encoded within formal abstraction. In this space Taylor plays with the slippage between representation and abstraction: she is not afraid to fragment a view, to contradict our understanding of spatial dynamics, to ask us to reconsider what we are looking at – and where we are looking from.

From behind refuses to offer a solid place to stand, asking us to navigate our own frames of reference. Where might we exist in relation to these paintings – and to the forces that have shaped them?

(Text by Dr Kirsty Baker)