PHOTO OP. x Malcolm Smith Gallery
Uxbridge Arts and Culture, Howick, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
13 Sep – 1 Nov 2025
PHOTO OP. x Malcolm Smith Gallery presents LONG COVID, an exhibition of solo and collaborative work by Matt Henry and Emil McAvoy. LONG COVID developed out of a period of intense and sustained conversation between the artists which began during the first COVID-19 lockdown of 2020.
Focusing on their shared interest in abstraction, the exhibition features McAvoy’s recent paintings based on the visual identity of the Government’s COVID-19 response and Henry’s ongoing work with real estate signage. Both artists explore the motifs of geometric abstraction as a form of mimicry, co-opting their compositions from visual communications.
At the nexus of applied art and painting, LONG COVID examines notions of contagion between forms of art and design, mining the political and poetic potential of geometric abstraction in post-COVID Aotearoa.
