Image: installation view, ‘Primavera 2019: Young Australian Artists’, 2019, photograph: Anna Kucera.
Primavera 2019 presents the work of seven artists, including two Indigenous artists – Rosina Gunjarrwanga and Kenan Namunjdja – who explore a broad range of ideas. These include the museum as institution, the endurance of cultural knowledge, notions of communication and the construction of meaning itself. Working across different media, Primavera 2019 sees curator Mitch Cairns embracing each artist’s intention as a valuable, original approach to art-making.
Some works are presented outside the MCA – as literary interventions in the accompanying exhibition catalogue and at KNULP, an artist-run space in Sydney’s inner-west (Mitchel Cumming). Other works are situated in the gallery but concealed from view in their packing crates (Lucina Lane). A further work is shown on the Museum’s Circular Quay façade as a painted banner for the first part of the exhibition, and then re-presented within the gallery for the final part of its display (Zoe Marni Robertson).
Sound and language are integral to Primavera 2019, represented in an instructional audio work and a suite of works on paper that represent speech as visual forms (Aodhan Madden). The tension between figurative and abstract painting is explored in a grouping of mirror paintings that reflect visitors as they move through space (Coen Young); and cultural knowledge is communicated in intricate bark paintings and lorrkkon (hollow log burial poles) which reference sacred sites and ancestral beings, as well as ceremonial designs, performance and song (Rosina Gunjarrwanga, Kenan Namunjdja).
SOURCE: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.