Gina O'Grady
Emerging Contemporary New Zealand Landscape Artist
Gina O'Grady is an Auckland-based artist whose evocative landscape paintings celebrate the beauty, solitude, and restorative power of Aotearoa New Zealand's wilderness. Alongside her career as a Paediatric Neurologist, Gina has maintained a lifelong connection with art, finding in painting a welcome balance to the demands of professional and family life. Through her creative practice, she embraces moments of calm, reflection, and reconnection with the places that inspire her most.
Having studied painting and printmaking throughout her school years, Gina returned to art with renewed purpose, developing a distinctive body of work centred on New Zealand's landscapes. Her love of hiking and exploring the backcountry provides both inspiration and subject matter, with many of her paintings featuring the country's iconic tramping huts set within dramatic alpine environments. These humble shelters represent places of refuge, companionship, and pause – spaces where people can reconnect with nature, friends, and whānau.
Working primarily in acrylic on canvas and board, Gina uses a layered approach to build depth, luminosity, and richness of colour. She is particularly drawn to the interplay of light across mountain ranges, valleys, and open landscapes, seeking to capture not only the appearance of a place but also the emotional response it evokes. Her paintings invite viewers to revisit cherished memories of time spent outdoors or to imagine themselves stepping into New Zealand's extraordinary natural environments.
Gina's work has been selected for a number of respected New Zealand art awards and exhibitions, including the Aspiring Art Awards and the Tasman National Art Awards. She has also contributed to exhibitions at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts and, in 2022, created a series of works in support of the Starship Foundation. Her paintings continue to resonate with collectors drawn to their warmth, technical refinement, and celebration of New Zealand's unique landscapes.
Through each work, Gina offers an invitation to slow down, reflect, and rediscover the restorative power of the natural world.
