Contemporary Indigenous Australian art
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art began in 1971 at Papunya, a government settlement in the Western Desert, where schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon encouraged Pintupi and Luritja men to paint their Dreaming stories on boards and later on canvas. The acrylic dot paintings that emerged - aerial maps of Country dense with ceremonial symbols - launched the Papunya Tula cooperative and became one of the most significant art movements of the late twentieth century. From the desert the practice spread across Australia: to Arnhem Land bark painting, the vivid color fields of Utopia artists such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the earthy memorial canvases of the Kimberley, and the politically charged work of urban Indigenous artists. The art carries law and culture: many designs encode sacred knowledge, and artists have adapted motifs for public view.
Defining characteristics
- Dense fields of dots, lines, and concentric circles encoding Country and Dreaming narratives
- Aerial, map-like compositions: the landscape seen from above
- Natural ochre palettes - reds, yellows, whites, blacks - or brilliant acrylic color
- Repeated ancestral motifs readable at once as abstraction and as story
- Sacred designs adapted for public view, sometimes veiled or masked
Key figures
- Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c. 1910-1996) — Utopia painter whose sweeping color works brought the movement to international attention
- Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (c. 1932-2002) — Papunya Tula master of layered Dreaming maps (Warlugulong)
- Rover Thomas (c. 1926-1998) — Kimberley painter of ochre Country and Cyclone Tracy canvases
- Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula (c. 1925-2001) — Early Papunya painter known for shimmering layers of overdotting
Example works
- Warlugulong — Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (1977)
- Earth's Creation — Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1994)
Sources
- Contemporary Indigenous Australian art - Wikipedia encyclopedia