The Dowse And City Gallery Wellington Unite For Landmark Jason Greig Exhibition Blood Is Thicker

The Dowse Art Museum and City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi are proud to announce Blood Is Thicker, an ambitious new exhibition on view at The Dowse from 29 November 2025 to 13 April 2026. This landmark collaboration brings together the darkly imaginative world of Aotearoa artist Jason Greig with masterpieces by some of Europe’s most celebrated printmakers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Co-curated by Aaron Lister (Senior Curator, City Gallery Wellington) and Dr Chelsea Nichols (Senior Curator, The Dowse), Blood Is Thicker marks the first major survey of Jason Greig’s practice in more than two decades.

“Jason Greig has long been a kind of cult figure in New Zealand art,” says Dr Chelsea Nichols. “With the backing of two institutions, this exhibition finally gives his practice the scale and context it deserves—placing his gothic imagination in conversation with centuries of artists who have wrestled with beauty, darkness and the unknown.”

Lister and Nichols have long shared an interest in the gothic and the uncanny. Their joint curatorial collaboration, Curator of Screams, has built a strong community of artists and audiences fascinated by the intersection of contemporary art and horror—a space where Greig’s harpies and werewolves roam freely.

“Our Curator of Screams projects have shown us how hungry people are for art that embraces the shadowy other of ourselves, our world and our art forms,” says Aaron Lister. “Blood Is Thicker channels that energy into a major institutional project—one that connects Greig’s world directly to the great tradition of printmaking and the visionary.”

The exhibition will bring together more than eighty works by Jason Greig, spanning from the mid-1980s to the present day. While Greig is best known for his monoprints, Blood Is Thicker will also include oil paintings, lithographs and etchings that reveal the full breadth of his practice. With the exception of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Greig’s work is not widely represented in public collections in Aotearoa, so the exhibition draws extensively on private collections nationwide.

In dialogue with Greig’s work, the exhibition will also feature an extraordinary selection of historical prints and drawings on loan from an anonymous Australian collector. Regarded by experts as one of the world’s finest private collections of Odilon Redon, this collection also includes works by Francisco Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Félicien Rops, Gustave Doré, James Ensor, William Blake, Jan Frans de Boever and Auguste Leroux.

Nichols notes that “having these historic works here in Aotearoa—many rarely seen outside Europe—is nothing short of remarkable. It allows us to see Greig’s lineage not as imitation, but as inheritance. We’re deeply grateful to our collector not only for assembling such a collection, but for trusting us to bring the dark, the visionary, and the sublime into public view. For many of our visitors, this will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stand before a suite of Goya or Redon works in person—and to feel the full thrum of their power for themselves.”

The exhibition will unfold across five galleries at The Dowse, guiding visitors through the darkly luminous world of Greig’s imagination. It begins with “The Guardians”—a circle of Greig’s iconic solitary figures, rendered in monoprints and suspended between light and shadow. From there, Greig’s works meets the Masters, staging a direct dialogue between Greig’s works and prints from Goya’s Los Caprichos and Redon’s haunting lithographs.

At the heart of the exhibition, a dramatic salon hang brings Greig’s art into rich conversation with historical works, revealing their shared dark energies and obsessions. Flanking this installation are presentations of Rops and Kollwitz—both cult figures of late 19th century printmaking. The final galleries turn inward, offering a deep dive into Greig’s own practice through two intertwined themes: Inner Demons and Otherworlds.

In addition to the exhibition, The Dowse and City Gallery will co-publish the first major monograph dedicated to Jason Greig, to be released in late 2026. Published by Massey University Press, it will expand on the exhibition’s themes, exploring the gothic, romantic and psychological undercurrents that run through his work, establishing his place within both Aotearoa’s contemporary art history and the wider lineage of dark romanticism.

Blood Is Thicker runs from 29 November 2025 to 13 April 2026 at The Dowse Art Museum, 45 Laings Road, Lower Hutt.

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