LONG COVID
Artist: Matt Henry & Emil McAvoy
Opening Event: September 13, 2025
PHOTO OP. X Malcolm Smith Gallery presents LONG COVID, an exhibition of solo and collaborative work by Matt Henry and Emil McAvoy. LONG COVID developed out of a period of intense and sustained conversation between the artists which began during the first Covid-19 lockdown of 2020
Focusing on their shared interest in abstraction, the exhibition features McAvoy’s recent Covid paintings and Henry’s ongoing work with real estate signage. Both artists explore the motifs of reductive geometric abstraction as a form of mimicry, lifting and adapting their compositions from visual communications and signage.
At the nexus of applied art and painting, the exhibition explores notions of contagion – between forms of art and design, and between the political and poetic potentials of post-formalist approaches to abstraction.
Emil McAvoy Bio
Emil McAvoy is an artist, curator, lecturer and art writer. His primary role is Collections Curator for the Vice Chancellor’s Office at Auckland University of Technology, where he also lectures in Photographic Practices and Communication Design. McAvoy has an MFA (First Class Honours) from the Elam School of Fine Arts, and has also lectured at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design, Victoria University of Wellington and Massey University across a range of disciplines.
McAvoy’s art practice is underpinned by an interest in the shifting cultural roles of artists – the artist as medium, critic, activist, citizen and public intellectual. His work spans a range of media including photography, painting, video and text. He has realised projects with City Gallery Wellington, The Dowse Art Museum, Aotearoa Art Fair, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Ilam Gallery at the University of Canterbury, and Old Government House at the University of Auckland. He has published widely as an essayist, critic and arts journalist for all the major print and online platforms in Aotearoa. He is the founder of independent curatorial platform PHOTO OP. and publishing imprint PUFF PIECE.
Matt Henry Bio
Matt Henry has an MFA from RMIT in Naarm Melbourne, and is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He has exhibited a number of solo projects with Starkwhite, and undertaken several solo installation-based projects with public galleries including the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts. His work is held in public and private collections including the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade, and Elevation Capital Art Collection.
Henry’s practice deals with the legacies of modernism and the allegorical potentials of painting. Primarily interested in the language of reductive abstraction, Henry’s ongoing investigation explores the interconnected histories of art and design and the problematics of viewing or considering painting in isolation. Drawing on the notion of commodification, Henry considers the history of cross-pollination between art and design to position painting within a broader field of signification where the hegemonic place of painting and values of art and commerce are blurred.
Matt Henry & Emil McAvoy Collaborations
While maintaining solo art practices, Matt Henry and Emil McAvoy have been collaborating on selected projects since 2015, connecting complementary approaches to painting, and a shared interest in the legacies of geometric abstraction. McAvoy has published writing on Henry’s practice for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, they have appeared in artist talks together, and also supported the development of each other’s solo practices through ongoing conversation.
In 2022, McAvoy invited Henry to stage the inaugural exhibition for PHOTO OP., a nomadic independent curatorial platform. The resulting exhibition, Double Grammar Zone, represented a pivot for Henry into medium format photography and an extension of his painting practice. In 2023, the pair collaborated on Political Landscape, a PHOTO OP. Edition co-opting the new National Party graphic identity which had been deployed across Aotearoa in the lead up to the general election. LONG COVID is their first two-person show.
Image Caption: Matt Henry, Black Mountain 2025
Acrylic on linen, 1200mm x 900mm
Photograph courtesy of the artist.