Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Stand for a moment beneath the great timber canopy at the entrance. Look up. The ceiling breaks into long, folded planes of warm golden wood, held aloft on slender columns that branch like trunks. Behind you, the trees of Albert Park move in the wind off the harbour. In front of you, glass walls let the light pour straight through. This is Auckland Art Gallery, and its first gesture is not a grand doorway. It is shade, and the feeling of standing at the edge of a forest.

The gallery carries two names. Auckland Art Gallery is the English one. Toi o Tāmaki is the Māori name. Toi means art, and Tāmaki is the traditional name for the Auckland isthmus, the narrow neck of land between two harbours. Put together, the name places the gallery firmly in this landscape. It says that the art inside belongs to this ground, and to the people who named it long before any city existed here.

Now turn and find the older building. It is easy to miss, because the new wings wrap around it. Look for the pale stone walls, the steep roofline and the small turrets. The style is French Renaissance, the kind of architecture you might expect on a château along the Loire, the great river valley of central France. It looks a little surprising here, under a South Pacific sky. And that surprise tells you something about the city that built it.

This building opened in 1888. It was the first permanent art gallery in New Zealand. At that time Auckland was a young colonial town, only a few decades old. Its leaders wanted the town to look serious, settled and cultured. So they chose an architecture borrowed from Europe. For many years the building was shared. It held both the city's art collection and its public library, side by side under one roof.

The early collection grew through gifts. One of the most important came from Sir George Grey, a former governor of New Zealand, who gave paintings, drawings and rare books to the young city. Another came from James Tannock Mackelvie, a businessman who had spent time in Auckland and later left a large bequest of art and decorative objects. These gifts gave a small colonial town a European collection it could never have bought on its own.

Here is the first thing many visitors miss. The gallery you are walking into today is really two buildings joined together. The heritage structure was carefully restored, and a large contemporary addition was built around it. The redeveloped gallery reopened in 2011. Two years later, at the World Architecture Festival, it was named World Building of the Year. That is a rare honour for an art museum anywhere, and it went to a building at the far end of the globe.

The new design came from the Australian firm Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp, working with the Auckland practice Archimedes Architects. Their idea was simple and quietly bold. Instead of competing with the old stone building, the new wings would lean towards the park. The timber canopies reach out like branches. The glass walls blur the line between inside and outside. As you move through the rooms, keep glancing out of the windows. The trees of Albert Park are part of the design.

Inside, the collection is the largest public art collection in New Zealand. It covers many centuries of European painting, but its heart is the art of this country and the wider Pacific. You will find works by Māori and Pacific artists, both historical and contemporary. You will find landscapes that show how settlers first tried to paint this unfamiliar light. And you will find artists who later rejected those European habits and searched for a way of seeing that belonged here.

Look for the portraits by Gottfried Lindauer and Charles Goldie. Both painted Māori sitters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The faces are painted in great detail, often showing tā moko, the traditional Māori tattoo. For many Māori families today, these portraits are not just paintings. They are images of ancestors. Some visitors stop in front of them to speak, or simply to stand quietly. That is the second thing worth knowing — in this room, a gallery wall can also be a family connection.

Then find the work of Colin McCahon, one of the most important New Zealand painters of the twentieth century. His paintings are often dark, with bold words written across hills and skies. Some carry lines from the Bible. Others show the stark shapes of the New Zealand landscape. Nearby, you may also find Frances Hodgkins, who left New Zealand and built her career in Europe. Together, they show two very different answers to the same question — how to be an artist from here.

As you walk, notice how the building changes the light. Some galleries are closed rooms with soft, even lighting, made to protect fragile works on paper. Others open to tall windows and the green of the park. The floors and stairways move between old and new. In some places you can see where the heritage walls meet the modern structure. Take your time on the stairs. The views back across the atrium are some of the best moments of a visit.

When you step outside again, you are at the edge of central Auckland. Albert Park rises behind the gallery, with its old trees, lawns and paths. The university buildings sit beyond it. Downhill, the streets lead towards the city centre and the harbour. Many people combine a visit here with a slow walk through the park. Under those trees, the canopy you saw at the entrance starts to make even more sense.

Before you go, stand once more under the timber canopy. Look at how the wooden ceiling folds above your head. Look at the old stone building tucked behind the glass. One part was built to make a young colonial town feel European. The other was built to make a modern city feel rooted in its own land. Between them, under this shelter of wood and light, the gallery holds both stories. Listen to the leaves in the park... and take that sound with you as you walk on.