Collaboration Wines x Natasha Wright
Each month, Boutique Connection sponsors Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.
This is our inaugural collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.
I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.
The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.
Natasha Wright
Natasha Wright’s paintings are instantly captivating. Based in New York but originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, her practice explores the female figure through layers of history, identity, and contemporary experience. Working between figuration and abstraction, Natasha creates bold, tactile paintings that feel both powerful and deeply human. Her subjects are confident, complex, and unapologetically present, inviting viewers to reconsider familiar ideas of femininity, strength, and self.
Handful
“Handful” commands attention through its layered emotional terrain - complex, multifaceted, and full of tension. It carries a kind of storm within it: a darkness that doesn’t suffocate, but instead pulses with sensitivity. There’s a quiet violence in it - not of destruction, but of vulnerability pushed to its brink.
The energy is dual-natured - undeniably powerful, like something elemental, but that power is complicated. It feels like holding something fragile with shaking hands - control on the edge of collapse. The moment just before the wind changes. You hear it pick up - that soft, eerie sound that signals a shift in pressure, a coming storm, or something being revealed.
There’s also a weight to the title “Handful”. Something small in form but overwhelming in presence - like an emotion too big for the body.
- Natasha
Collaboration Wines - Argent
Like Handful, Argent carries a dark brooding energy beneath its calm surface. Layers of black fruit, leather, and spice unfold slowly, balanced by fine tannins and quiet precision.
Winemaker Julz, whose time in Napa shaped her belief that “smallness is not a barrier but an asset,” brings a deft touch with oak and a gentle sensitivity to balance. Inspired by the parallels between art and wine, she has crafted a wine that is dense and powerful yet surprisingly light on its feet.
- Renée Dale
—
NATASHA WRIGHT - Main Character
Opening Wednesday 15th October, 6-8pm
15th Oct - 9th Nov 2025Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Main Character, featuring a new body of works by Natasha Wright.
The opening will take place on Wednesday 15th October 6-8pm, with wines from Boutique Connection and cheeses from Kāpiti. All Welcome.
Wright (b.1987 Aotearoa, New Zealand) is a New Zealand born artist based in New York City. Wright’s practice explores and redresses the depiction of woman-as-subject throughout history. Her large-scale paintings fuse figuration and abstraction in intricately layered compositions; referencing traditional modes of portraiture within contemporary contexts…—
Read the full exhibition text by Evangeline Riddiford Graham here
