Huntress x Paul Martinson

Each month, Boutique Connection supports Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.

This is a 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.

Paul Martinson

Paul Martinson’s work reflects a deep awareness of time, place, and the shifting relationship between humans and the natural world. His paintings hold the space between history and the present, drawing on both personal observation and wider environmental narratives.

There is a quiet restraint to his approach... rather than overwhelming the viewer, Paul pares things back, allowing space for reflection nad to consider what has been lost, what remains, and what continues to evolve.

Birds in a Landscape

Birds in a Landscape is deliberately monochromatic, echoing the sepia tones of early photography. It feels like a memory... or perhaps a fragment of one, capturing a time when human settlement began to more profoundly shape the natural environment.

There is stillness in the composition, yet also an underlying sense of movement. The birds feel both present and fleeting... suspended between arrival and departure.

The work is quite shocking… both tragic and hopeful. It reflects on the temporary nature of life, where landscapes shift and species come and go. Nothing is fixed, yet everything leaves a trace.

Huntress - Matiti Pétillant Naturel

Huntress Matiti Pétillant Naturel is a wine that embraces both the past and the present. Made using an ancient method, it captures fermentation in motion... bottled before it fully finishes, resulting in a lightly sparkling wine that feels alive, textural, and gently untamed.

What makes it such a natural pairing with Birds in a Landscape is this shared sense of time and transition. The painting looks back with quiet reflection, while the wine carries that same idea forward... an old method rediscovered, evolving in a modern context.

There is no heavy hand here... just nature. A reminder that life, much like the wine and the work, is always in motion.

- Renée Dale

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Paul Martinson
Transition

1 - 24 April 2026

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Transition by Aotearoa New Zealand environmental painter Paul Martinson.

Transition is a thought-provoking exhibition that pairs science-informed imagery with a lifetime spent observing Aotearoa’s natural world. Through paintings that speak to the archipelago’s beauty and its profound ecological losses, Transition invites viewers to reflect on how human arrival has re-shaped forest and bird life, and the very soundscape of Aotearoa’s bush.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s archipelago - a cluster of hundreds of relatively small islands at the bottom of the planet - bears a lamentable distinction. It is often described as the bird extinction capital of the world, with more than one quarter of all human-caused bird extinctions worldwide occurring here.

A painter’s lens on science and place - Martinson’s practice bridges empirical insight with the intimate experience of years spent observing New Zealand’s flora and fauna. The exhibition explores how scientific understanding informs our grasp of ecosystems while recognizing the personal, sensory and surreal experience of place—the textures of leaves, the hush of a dawn, and the enduring music that remains only as memory in the wake of extinction.

A central and ongoing motif in Martinson’s works is the Huia - a dark greenish monarch of the forest that once heralded the dawn chorus with its flute-like song. The works render the huia as a powerful symbol of both loss and reverence, acknowledging shared responsibility across Māori and European histories for the species’ decline while honoring a collective love for this iconic songster across generations.

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Read more here.