At TEFAF Maastricht, Indigenous Australian Art Takes Center Stage

In a first for TEFAF Maastricht, visitors to this year’s fair will encounter a booth dedicated entirely to Australia’s First Nations art. The show is set to feature over a dozen artists, working from the 1960s to present day, providing a broad picture of the contemporary Indigenous Australian art movement.

The Indigenous people of Australia have had an artistic tradition for thousands of years, with rock art dated to around 30,000 years ago. What will be seen in the booth, though — from eucalyptus bark paintings, collected in the mid-20th century, to the canvases of Emily Kam Kngwarray and Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri — is adaptation and innovation, as artists began painting for an audience and embracing new mediums.

Created against the backdrop of 20th-century colonialism, these artworks assert cultural identity and honor ancestral lands, totems and rituals.

The exhibition at TEFAF, March 15-20, is being presented by D’Lan Contemporary, a gallery based in Melbourne, Australia, at a time of surging recognition for Aboriginal Australian art.

Last year, the Indigenous Australian artist Archie Moore won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale with an installation that included a huge family tree. Later this year, the National Gallery of Art in Washington will host a large-scale exhibition of more than 200 Aboriginal artworks, which will then tour across the United States and Canada.

“Art has built important bridges between Aboriginal people and the wider world,” said Philip Watkins, a man of Arrernte, Warumungu and Larrakia heritage, and the chief executive of Desart, an organization that represents Aboriginal-owned art centers in Australia, in a phone interview.

While not directly involved with the TEFAF exhibition, Watkins said “much is owed” to the artists assembled — all of whom are now deceased. “Contemporary Indigenous art has become the way through which the world is willing to listen to what we have to say,” he said.

The Mudjinbardi Barks

With their striking white-on-brown color palette, a collection of eight eucalyptus bark paintings is sure to stand out at the booth. The paintings were made by Baimunungbi (also known as Jacky), Diidja, Lanyirrda (also known as Billy) and Djurrubiga, four men from the Mudjinbardi community in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, east of Darwin.

Made with white and yellow ochre, the elongated figures in the works depict Namarnde, beings that have abilities beyond human capacity. In Western Arnhem Land cosmology, these spirits could assume human form and behave unpredictably — sometimes malevolently — toward humans.

“It’s time that early bark paintings such as these are recognized as fine works of art, not only in Europe, but around the world,” Luke Scholes, director at D’Lan Contemporary, said in a phone interview from Australia’s Northern Territory. “They are works by highly skilled, profoundly knowledgeable artists,” he added.

For much of the 20th century, paintings and sculptures made by Aboriginal artists were seen as so-called ethnographic curiosities, rather than fine art. Scholes noted that this bark collection marked a rare showing in Europe.

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri

Alongside these early bark paintings will hang “Wallaby Sign for Men and Women” (1972), a small but important work by Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri — one the most significant figures in Indigenous Australian contemporary art.

Tjapaltjarri, a Pintupi artist, started painting in 1971 at the Papunya settlement, west of Alice Springs, where he and other artists began transferring their traditional designs and Dreaming stories onto more permanent mediums like board and canvas with acrylics. The Dreaming, or Tjukurpa (in Pintupi), is the time when ancestral beings traveled, shaped the natural landscape and created life.

“It’s an absolute privilege to show this artwork,” D’Lan Davidson, the gallery’s founder, said in a phone interview. “It is one of the first paintings where you see this traditional Aboriginal style make a leap to a contemporary medium.”

The work was painted at Papunya, framed in Melbourne, and ended up in a private collection in Texas before being consigned to D’Lan Contemporary.

Some of the paintings purchased during this period were bought by Americans working at Pine Gap, Scholes said, referring to a military base outside Alice Springs run by the Australians and the Americans.

While the Papunya community became renowned for its dot paintings — one of the most famous styles of Indigenous Australian art — Tjapaltjarri created “Wallaby Sign for Men and Women” before dotted backgrounds became standard. His piece uses a striking contrast, a black background from which bold icons jump out, to depict an ancestral wallaby’s movements and a sacred ceremony.

Such rituals would occur in Tjapaltjarri’s birthplace, Marnpi — a place that served as an endless source of inspiration for him.

“This is the Red Kangaroo Dreaming place. This is the Hills Kangaroo place. This is the Owlet Nightjar [place],” he reflected on his homeland in a 1984 interview with John Kean.

Emily Kam Kngwarray

The biggest star in this exhibition is Emily Kam Kngwarray, an Anmatyerr artist from the Utopia region who elevated contemporary Indigenous art to new heights despite only painting on canvas during the final eight years of her life. Her output was extraordinary — she created roughly 3,000 works, or about one painting daily, according to the National Museum of Australia.

In “Untitled — Summer Transition” (1991), the canvas shimmers with color and life, as Kngwarray’s layered dots in white, yellow and indigo evoke the desert ground, alive with vegetation — imagining the botanical bounty of her ancestral homeland at the turn of the season. The activities of a wandering emu, sacred to her people, are demarked.

Kngwarray was born around 1910 at Alhalkere in the central Australian desert, some 140 miles northeast of Alice Springs. Long before turning to canvas, she expressed her cultural knowledge through other visual mediums. Notably she worked with batik, a method of creating patterns on cloth using wax-resist dyeing.

In a 2010 interview with Jennifer Green, a linguistics expert and postdoctoral candidate, Kngwarray explained her transition to canvas in pragmatic terms: “I didn’t want to continue with the hard work batik required — boiling the fabric over and over, lighting fires, and using up all the soap powder. That’s why I gave up batik and changed to canvas — it was easier.”

Central to her community were awelye ceremonies, in which women gathered in song and dance, and painted their upper bodies in patterns reflecting Alhalker culture. It is these patterns depicted in “Awelye II” (1995), which abandons dot work in favor of a tangle of serpentine lines. They depict the root system of the pencil yam — a totemic plant central to her people’s belief system and even her own name. According to Green, Emily was the artist’s “whitefeller name,” while to Indigenous people, her name was Kam — an Indigenous term for the yam’s seeds and pods.

When she was alive, her name was spelled as Emily Kame Kngwarreye. In 2023, the National Gallery of Australia adopted the new spelling — Emily Kam Kngwarray — after what it described as extensive consultation with the artist’s community and with Green. Other institutions and galleries have followed suit.

Kelli Cole, a Warumungu and Luritja woman, is the senior curator of the Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition at Tate Modern in London, opening July 10 — the first major European showcase of Kngwarray’s work. She noted that Kngwarray was not only a talented artist, but also a businesswoman. “She knew exactly what she was doing when she was painting and winning awards,” Cole said by phone.

Though not involved with the TEFAF exhibition, Cole said that to exhibit in Europe would have been a point of pride for the artists featured.

“These artists took immense pride in seeing their country on walls,” she said. “That’s not saying just in the local town where they painted either, but in major national and international institutions.”

Whether they are viewing a Kngwarray work in London or a Mudjinbardi bark in Maastricht, Cole asked audiences to remember one other thing: “You’re seeing a living culture before you” she said. “Those awelye ceremonies are still taking place.”