Dark shadows, werewolves and Old Masters gather in Blood Is Thicker, a darkly luminous exhibition where monoprints and paintings by Lyttelton artist Jason Greig commune with their ancestors—a private collection of 18th- and 19th-century masterpieces by Francisco Goya, Odilon Redon, Käthe Kollwitz, Gustave Doré, Felicien Rops and others. Together, they reveal a gothic lineage where printer’s ink flows like blood through art history’s veins.

Greig has long been the romantic, old soul of New Zealand art—a maker of haunted worlds and summoner of inner demons, both mythic and human. He is a ‘wilfully ignorant symbolist’, intuitively channelling images, ideas and figures from across time and cultural forms into what can feel like an ever-expanding fever dream where reason slips and reverie reigns. His art feels conjured from another time and place, yet belongs utterly to this one: a world where Lemmy from Motörhead sits comfortably alongside the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, where Milton’s Pandæmonium finds itself recast as post-quake Christchurch.

Blood Is Thicker pairs Greig’s work with those who came before and share his obsessions and powers: the dark masters who conjured the strange, the sublime and the exquisitely beautiful from shadow and ink. Neither a traditional survey nor a straightforward art history, this exhibition unfolds as an immersive séance across time—a conversation between kindred spirits, bound by darkness, beauty and the power of print and paint to take us elsewhere.

Curated by Aaron Lister and Chelsea Nichols, this ambitious collaboration between The Dowse Art Museum and City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi is a love letter to the gothic imagination.