Talking about Abstraction

The current generation of young to mid-career non-Indigenous abstract painters in Australia have been inspired and influenced by Aboriginal painting more than any other. This is the basic tenet of Talking About Abstraction, an exhibition that explores the way in which Aboriginal painting has impacted on recent Australian painting. As Aboriginal art became more available for exhibition, its impact on young artists, Aboriginal and non-Indigenous, inevitably became more profound. In her substantial catalogue text titled Thinking Beyond Abstraction, curator Felicity Fenner claims that the impact of Aboriginal art, is borne out not only by the visual relationships between the Aboriginal and non-Indigenous works in the exhibition, but by interviews and informal conversations with artists over a number of years.

The Aboriginal artists included and the geographic regions reflected in this exhibition are determined by the perceived degrees of innovation and influence. Represented are the desert communities of Utopia, Haasts Bluff and Kintore, the eastern Kimberley Ranges in the north-west and Peppimenarti in the north. The featured non-Indigenous painters are, conversely, based in the eastern metropolitan centres of Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne.

In her foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Vivien Johnson explains that 'Talking About Abstraction explores the still largely one-way conversation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous art by bringing together leading exponents of these popular forms of contemporary Indigenous painting with non-Indigenous abstract painters, selected on the basis of the clearly articulated influence on their practice of Indigenous art, specifically of the work by the Aboriginal artists represented in the exhibition... The curatorial premise suggests that it is no longer a question of analysing Indigenous art's relationship to the mainstream, but the other way around. I will go further, and say what Indigenous voices have been saying for some time now: Indigenous art is the mainstream of Australian contemporary art. Not only in the eyes of overseas audiences for whom Indigenous artists have the only distinctively Australian voices, but for the Australian art world itself. What is at stake for non-Indigenous artists nowadays is how to get some kind of foothold in this new reality'.

For further information, please contact Ivan Dougherty Gallery.