Icon
Maggie Friedman, Ammon Ngakuru
14 August - 13 September 2025

Icon by definition 1. the subject of a devotional painting. In the Byzantine period this might be Christ or the Virgin. Icon by definition 2. is a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration.

Icon brings together new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Maggie Friedman and painting and sculpture by Tāmaki-based Ammon Ngakuru. Images of Jeff Koons, Kati Heck, Roy Lichtenstein, and many others, appear in Friedman’s paintings, while Ngakuru’s work has contained references to Marcel Duchamp, Richard Serra, Pierre Huyghe, and Koons again. Icon enquires about how sentiment and fandom influences each artist’s selection of material, how these decisions provoke questions of value, specifically how and why it is bestowed, and how these choices contribute to the construction of an artistic identity.

Friedman has been painting paintings of other paintings since 2022; paintings that painters look at, either in adoration or with aversion. Photographs taken by the artist are cropped and projected onto the canvas, then painted exclusively in a single colour: Kama fluorescent green. Friedman avoids expressive or subjective decisions about the application of paint, where possible, in an attempt to “deny the hand”. Friedman's pictures increasingly operate in relation to her writing practice and the built identity of a painter.

Ngakuru’s vernacular of symbols and images are fondly familiar. They include, most recently, a stomach, the New Zealand flag, worker ants, and various middle class commodities. In Icon, the crumpled pyjamas of The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog – the sleeping sculpture from the artist’s previous solo presentation with the gallery –now exist in a new painting, restlessly laying next to a rendering of Serra’s Tilted Arc. The new works in Icon extend Ngakuru's meandering yet astute parable of value and it’s attribution and distribution in the art world, and the world more broadly.


Maggie Friedman (b. 1995) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from ArtCenter in Pasadena in 2022. Recent exhibitions include: Alibis, As It Stands, Los Angeles (2024) and Seven Paintings, Shoot the Lobster, New York (2023) as well as group exhibitions 31, Iowa Projects, New York (2025), Again & Again, Overduin and Co, Los Angeles (2025), Sprezzatura, As It Stands, Los Angeles (2024), Ashes to Ashes, STARS, Los Angeles (2024, as Paul Manton) and Sweet Days of Discipline, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2022). She is the designer of S/S '22 Novel Collection and the author of Novel (2022), and is currently writing an art world mystery novel that will be published by Apogee Graphics, Los Angeles.

Ammon Ngakuru (b. 1993) lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He holds a BVA from Auckland University of Technology and a MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts. Recent exhibitions include: Barm, with Shiraz Sadikeen, Envy, Pōneke Wellington (2025), Ammon Ngakuru @ May Art Fair, Tāmaki Makaurau (2025), Affirmations, Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2024); and Misere, Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2022). Ammon’s work has been included in large-scale group exhibitions including: Aotearoa Contemporary, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2024); The long waves of our ocean (curated by Hanahiva Rose), National Library of New Zealand, Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington (2022). Ngakuru is working on a new commission for Auckland Art Gallery’s Edmiston North Sculpture Terrace, opening in September.