Kuruwarriyingathi Bijarrb Paula Paul – My country, 2009.
© of the Artist. Courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Visual Music: Indigenous Masters of Light and Colour is a vibrant NGV Collection focus featuring eight senior Indigenous women artists at the forefront of contemporary art practice.
During the 1990s, Indigenous Australian women emerged as artists of astonishing innovation and eloquence, a phenomenon that has positioned them at the forefront of contemporary Indigenous art practice. The eight senior Indigenous masters of light and colour represented in this special NGV Collection Focus inform their paintings with profound knowledge and cultural memory of Country and its sanctity. The works evidence the artists’ embodied experiences that are both physical and mnemonic and which predated European contact and its consequent cultural and intellectual assail. These intrepid practitioners of contemporary art have simultaneously come to the fore in two distinct cultural and geographical regions of Indigenous Australia: the vast inland deserts and a tiny island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland.
This new display features works by Sally Gabori, Paula Paul , Pulpurru Davies, Alkawari Dawson, Lorna Napurrula Fencer, Wingu Tingima, Milly Kelly and Wakartu Cory. The eight intrepid practitioners of contemporary art represented in Visual Music: Indigenous Masters of Light and Colour have simultaneously come to the fore in two distinct regions of Indigenous Australia: the vast inland deserts and a tiny island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland. Together they decisively engage with the physicality of paint and the fearlessness of colour, unfettered by precedent or white preconceptions of Indigenous art. For these women artists the act of painting is an animated and gendered performance, which connects them holistically to events in the past, present and future, and corresponds to their ritual song and dance.
These Indigenous artists are radical risk-takers. Their work runs counter to the stylistic tendency evident in many parts of Indigenous Australia towards ever finer and more nuanced abstraction focused on lines, dots, fluctuating linear rhythms and shifting tonalities of an increasingly restricted palette. Instead, their paintings are conjunctions of iridescent colour, forms, textures, public and sacred stories and tactile sensations that point up transcendent powers sensed in freshwater or saltwater Country; their designs and gestures bear the strength of whole bodies, not merely of fingers trained to hold a pencil. The visual music of these sentient ‘Countryscapes’ is not a form of abstraction or minimalism, but rather is an ultimate expression of the artists’ groundedness and joyous connection with nature.
SOURCE: Visual Music: Indigenous Masters of Light and Colour By Judith Ryan. NGV.
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To go into more details about the exhibition:
Read the dedicated Chronique Curatoriale