ArtX Contemporary, Seattle, Washington
Continuing through March 22, 2025
March 15, 2025
A Seattle couple, an attorney and a law school professor, is responsible for introducing contemporary Australian aboriginal art not only to Pacific Northwest collectors and ethnic art enthusiasts, but also to significant institutions such as the Seattle Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum, New York. “The Creation Circle: Aboriginal Art and Time” is a small, museum-quality survey of recent painters, mostly women, from Australia’s widespread Aboriginal communities. Far from an introduction, then, this exhibition pinpoints the growth of major figures, some of whom have already been documented in publications and international touring shows.
For Aboriginal cultures, time is a concept that transcends Western concepts such as finite narratives, beginnings and endings, and retrospective outlooks or prognostications about the future. Instead, it posits an implicitly continuous span of culture, civilization and achievement expressed in art works that symbolically reflect family histories, agricultural customs, weather patterns, and geological formations. As a result, abstract painting of this kind — on canvas, linen, and wood — operates on two different levels: nonrepresentational imagery and deeply embedded cultural encodings that reference hermetic meaning systems. We are able to appreciate the artworks without having to be informed, or even aware, of the origins of deep patterns of marks and structural formations reflecting tribal customs and in-group references. Ancestral practices such as sand painting or genealogical legends about grandmothers’ gardening are alluded to in the titles. The “creation circle” of the exhibit title is a reference to groups of women and men making the pictures that commemorate such practices.
Size is highly variable in “The Creation Circle.” Some works are tiny, barely 12 inches square, like Jaclyn Holmes Nagala’s “Collecting Bud Seeds, Bush Desert Flowers” (2023) with its patterned background and simple curved and spiral lines overlaying it. Others, like the comparatively large “(Fire Stick) Black Boy” (2023) by Kurun Warun, is over five feet tall, with an interrupted grid of horizontal black lines and a pulsing central wedge. A highly schematized human figure advances the limits of abstraction, pushing Waran’s work closer to one extreme of modernist abstraction that privileges flatness and hearkens back to New York School painting of the 1940s. At that time, the abstract expressionists (before they became Abstract Expressionists) were collectively immersed in creating mythic symbols that they claimed to be universal. Adolph Gottlieb’s early “bursts” are a parallel to Nagala; Barnett Newman’s “zips” foretell Warun’s vertical slash, but decades earlier and half a world away. Gottlieb and Mark Rothko discussed Greek mythology; Newman invoked the Old Testament.
What the Papunya Tula (Western Desert) artists share with the New York School artists, including Jackson Pollock, Rothko and, later, Helen Frankenthaler is a resistance to deep-space perspective, instead favoring acceptance of the physical properties of two-dimensional space, i.e., what critic Clement Greenberg called the “flatness of the picture plane.” In both cases, profound allusions and timeless content were intended. In fact, Rothko’s mantra for his mythic-symbolic period was “tragic and timeless.” Clearly parallel to this, Serina Nangarrayi responds to Pollock’s all-over composition with “Catalogue No. SJ2309056” (2023), as has Gloria Petyarre (Northern Territory) in her “Leaves—Bush Medicine Dreaming” (2006), and also Abie Loy Kemarre in “Leaves 5766” (2008); and “Yam Seeds in My Grandmother’s Country” (2023) by Elizabeth Kunoth Kngwarreye.
More familiar is the traditional employment of dot patterns and concentric circles of broken lines, which both Pollie Nangala and Pelita Napurrula extend from the kind of Aboriginal painting first introduced to American audiences in the 1980s. Although only three feet high and 11 inches wide, Napurulla’s “Catalogue No. PN2308010” (2023) uses verticality to stress a totemic reading of hierarchical symbols distantly echoing Tibetan meditation scrolls as well as Rothko’s vertical floating clouds.
On a more colorful level, tile-like acrylics on linen by Janice Stanley (APY Territory), Rosie Nampitjina and Kenarre pool paint into swaths of intermeshing colors, often in pastel tones and rainbow combinations. Kenarre’s “Sandhills 1710” (2007) connects broken hemispherical rainbow arcs while Stanley’s stacks of blended shades of yellow, blue, pink and gray extend beyond the canvas’ edge, as in “Pantu (Salt Lake 253-24, 2024) and “Pantu (Salt Lake 276-23, 2023).” Who would have thought that Frankenthaler’s examples of thinning and pooling paint would be retrieved and reinstigated — completely independently — 60 years after their North American inception?
Consider Morris Louis, for that matter. His upward parallel swoops of contrasting, thinned acrylics are tamed by Stanley, but still attain a compressed power within their four-foot squares of canvas. We should also learn more about how these artists are regarded in Australia. This selection of Western Desert painters promulgates bold claims on pictorial vocabularies all their own. American echoes popping up so far away and decades later give new credence to the enduring examples of modernist painting’s equally profound philosophical aims combining innovations of color, space and form.
Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.
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