Will Owen visits and review the current exhibition at the Australia Museum, Papunya Painting: Out of the desert.
Quoted from his article:
Our first goal upon arriving in Sydney was to visit the Australian Museum and see the Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert exhibition that is on show here now from the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. I had written an extensive piece based on the catalog and website for this show at the start of the year; I was quite impressed by the wealth of information that the two together offered about the show, the painters, the decade.
Nothing in either could have prepared me for the experience of the paintings themselves.
This is one of the most stunning shows of Indigenous art I’ve ever seen. There is no lack of drama in the presentation: here, as in Canberra, the halls are darkened, the paintings precisely framed in rectangles of light that make them float across the field of vision. The sound of old men singing fills the dim rooms. The museum was nearly empty the afternoon we arrived, and so the paintings themselves were the most significant and demanding presence in the space: all of this made the experience almost otherworldly.
