Bowen Galleries is thrilled to present Gregory O’Brien’s latest exhibition, At the Washaway.

‘The paintings focus on two very different coastal locations: Wellington Harbour (beside which I live) and the Pacific island of Niue, which I visited in 2015 and 2022.

The Wellington paintings incorporate the Days Bay Wharf and the now demolished warehouses and jetties at Shelly Bay. The Niue paintings include elements from Alofi and Avatele.

The Washaway is the name of a beachfront bar that used to function just above the high-tide mark at Avatele. It was famous for having an honesty-based bar system. Basically, you wrote what you were drinking in an exercise book, and at the end of the day or evening, you would ask around and find who, among those in the bar, you should pay the money to. It seemed a very virtuous, honest, open-hearted place, but also high-spirited and (I imagine) from time to time given over to the occasional excess.

I hope the paintings capture both a state of mind and a sense of the physical locations themselves. These waterside locations have always been an inspiration for me as a writer and a painter... One gets a sense of arrival and departure, the beginning of life and its end. The freighters and other vessels hint at journeys/voyages, and also the exchange of goods.

The exhibition also includes a number of etchings made in collaboration with the Niue-based artist John Pule. Two of these etchings are meditations on the sinking of the Manawanui off the coast of Samoa late last year. They capture something of the strangeness (and a sense of dread) associated with the current predicament in which nature is rendered vulnerable.’

Gregory O’Brien 2025 .