[2] At age 28 Hitchings opened New Zealand's first modernist dealer gallery, in a converted warehouse space at 39 Bond Street in central Wellington.
In the gallery Hitchings showed the work of emerging painters who went on to become major figures in New Zealand art, including Toss Woollaston, Rita Angus and Colin McCahon, alongside Douglas MacDiarmid and Evelyn Page.
"[4] Contemporary photographs of the gallery show a simple, airy space where furniture, ceramics, textiles and artworks are displayed together, suggesting how a modern home could be decorated.
[5] Art historian Gordon H. Brown has observed that the gallery created ‘a clientele who more easily were able to develop a sense of artistic discrimination through exposure to a continuously changing display of carefully selected paintings, prints and handicrafts’[8] In 2008 the Museum of Wellington City & Sea staged an exhibition recreating Hitchings’ gallery.
[11] Justine Olsen, curator of Decorative and Applied Arts at Te Papa, was interviewed about Helen Hitchings and the influence of her gallery in 2015.