The rising stars of the New Zealand art auction market

Who are the biggest movers in the art market since 2020?

Over the past five years, the New Zealand art market has experienced considerable growth, particularly during the Covid years when many new buyers entered with significant liquidity. Since the market peak of 2022 there has been some contraction, yet a few artists have bucked this trend, their prices continuing to rise.

Check out some of our top performers below:

Pauline Yearbury
As the first female Māori graduate from Elam in the 1940s, Pauline Yearbury (working in partnership with her husband James) established a gallery in the Bay of Islands between 1966 and 1977. Together they produced figurative carved and painted wooden panels illustrating Māori creation narratives, alongside painted works on board. It is the sculptural wooden panels that are now most sought after. Prior to 2020, works by Yearbury appeared rarely at auction and typically achieved only a few hundred dollars. Post 2022, however, her market has undergone the most dramatic reassessment of any New Zealand artist, with prices shifting from $300 to a baseline of around $3,000, and reaching a peak of $31,000 for an oil painting. The supply of works has also increased markedly, with 54 examples offered in the past three years compared with a single occasional lot in earlier decades. The catalyst for this revaluation is uncertain, though some point to her inclusion in the landmark Toi Tū Toi Ora exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery in 2020–21. Equally, the greater visibility of her work through more consistent supply has enabled collectors to engage with and recognise its quality and cultural importance.

Flora Scales
The market for Flora Scales remains defined by rarity. Only 17 paintings have sold in the past three decades, some being repeat appearances. This extreme scarcity, combined with her modernist sensibility, formal compositions and gestural brushwork, and the support of recent scholarly research and the establishment of an artist website, has intensified demand. The last two works offered in 2025 realised $28,000 and $28,500, far surpassing her earlier record of $16,000. Given the unpredictability of supply, it may be years before another work appears, but the market trajectory suggests continued upward pressure on values.

Brent Wong
In 2022, prices for senior painter Brent Wong recalibrated following the release of major works from the Spark and BNZ corporate collections. His 1970s surrealist landscapes depicting architectural forms floating over desolate terrain have long been considered his most desirable works but struggled to exceed $100,000, despite estimates consistently pitched at that level for two decades. The turning point came with a BNZ painting that realised $395,000 against a $100,000 estimate, effectively resetting market expectations. Since then, two further works have surpassed the $100,000 mark, with heightened interest extending even to Wong’s later works, were recent auction sales have achieved well over salesroom estimates.

Sandy Adsett
The rising recognition of Māori Modernism has significantly boosted the market for Sandy Adsett. Although many of his works date from the 1970s and 1980s, slightly later than the foundational figures of the movement, they share its fusion of traditional Māori art forms with Western modernist idioms. Adsett’s signature unfurling koru forms, often presented in circular formats on dark grounds, reimagine kōwhaiwhai ceiling rafter painting within a modernist framework. Coupled with acknowledgement of his role as a teacher and mentor, this has driven a dramatic market shift. Works that once fetched around $3,000 now regularly achieve more than $20,000.