Jamie Te Heuheu (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) is a painter whose practice unfolds in the interstices of abstraction, emotion, and cultural memory. Based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Te Heuheu graduated with First Class Honours from the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 2020.
Te Heuheu quickly emerged as a catalytic force within Christchurch’s contemporary art scene. In 2021, he co-founded The Den, an artist-run venue championing emergent practices and fostering a community of experimental dialogue. Though The Den concluded with its final showcase at the Aotearoa Art Fair in 2022, its ethos of collaborative inquiry continues to inform Te Heuheu’s approach to painting.
In 2025 Starkwhite showed Te Heuheu at the Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, Sydney, and Aoetearoa Art Fairs, to great interest from collectors and the art world. Te Heuheu’s most recent work, exhibited with Starkwhite as You and I in Unison in 2025 and previewed at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, marks a deepening of his engagement with rigorous, restrained monochrome and colour field abstraction
With Te Heuheu’s practice, process and brushwork become meditative acts. His palette is deliberately limited, yet within these constraints he orchestrates tonal shifts of remarkable subtlety, evoking mood, memory, and place with a precision that is felt more than seen.
What distinguishes Te Heuheu’s abstraction is its refusal of spectacle. These are not works that demand attention but reward patience. Surface modulation, line, and texture operate as conduits for introspection, inviting viewers into a contemplative encounter. They resist fixed interpretation, instead offering a porous field where emotional landscapes may be projected, refracted, and reimagined. This aligns his practice with artists like Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, and Maureen Lander.
His work has been described as “thought-provoking” and “emotionally resonant,” with a quiet intensity that rewards sustained attention. Harriet Cowie, writing for The Denizen, notes that Te Heuheu’s paintings “don’t scream for attention, but they hold it,” highlighting his ability to evoke mood through subtle tonal shifts and restrained brushwork.
Rebecca Fox of the Otago Daily Times observes that his abstractions “ebb and flow like the ocean,” suggesting a rhythmic, almost tidal quality to his layering of colour and texture. She praises his ability to “express emotion without narrative,” positioning his work within a lineage of affective abstraction that privileges atmosphere over figuration
Increasingly recognised for their quiet intensity, Te Heuheu’s paintings offer a counterpoint to the noise of contemporary visual culture. They ask us to slow down, to attend, to feel. In doing so, they transform formal abstraction into a site of sensory and spiritual encounter.