Suite Art Gallery

Having casually bought and sold art since his university days, David Alsop decided that it was probably time to establish his own gallery, after returning from overseas. Some eight years later Suite Gallery now finds itself in Cuba Street, having been back and forth across the city from Newtown to Oriental Bay.

This isn’t the first time this gallery has called Wellington’s cultural runway home, but of all its various presences, this latest is the most visually arresting. Peering in through the grand glass frontage, it might not be immediately apparent that Suite currently represents an almost even male-female mix of 12 artists, which include brothers and sisters and classmates from the Massey and Ilam School of Fine Arts.

Notable names on this list include Arie Hellendoorn, Roger Boyce, Wayne Youle, and Ans Westra – a New Zealand photographer of Dutch extraction and holder of an Icon Award through the NZ arts foundation. Potential buyers can in fact peruse Westra’s entire archive and catalogues of other artists represented by Suite behind the gallery proper, in a comfortable stock room that looks out to a courtyard that Alsop has plans to refurbish with a sculpture garden.

The Suite stock rooms are cosy enough to flick through the many hundreds of works on offer by each artist. Priced between two and six figures, Suite caters for would-be buyers at each end of the spectrum with a focus on providing their clients with some structure around the typically unregulated world of art buying.