The Aboriginal art of northeast Arnhem Land in Australia is both ancient and recent. For thousands of years, the Yolngu people of this remote, culturally rich region have been painting in the sand and on their bodies, rendering features of the landscape and legends of their ancestors into sacred designs.
But those drawings were ephemeral. The creation of a sellable, commodified art for outsiders — paintings made with human-hair brushes and traditional ochers that are stabilized with fixatives on a support of eucalyptus bark — began in 1935 through contact with white Australians.
In less than a century, this art movement has burgeoned, and the constraints imposed by clan elders have adapted to changing times and an accelerating market. The traditional edicts — only men could paint and only natural materials could be used — have been loosened, especially in the admission of women, who are now some of the most renowned Yolngu artists. But almost all of Yolngu art, which is supported and disseminated through the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Center in the small community of Yirrkala, about 450 miles east of Darwin, is still made from ocher pigments of ground stone.
One remarkable treasure included in “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting From Yirrkala,” a ravishing show at the Asia Society, is the very first Yolngu eucalyptus bark painting. Depicting animals and one male figure, all crosshatched with geometric patterns, it was created in 1935 by Wongu Munungurr, a clan leader, as a thank-you gift for Donald Thomson, a white Australian anthropologist who interceded in 1933 to ease tensions after the killings by tribesmen of five Japanese fishermen and an Australian constable. Along with later pieces made for Thomson, and other Aboriginal pieces that he collected in the ’30s and ’40s, the artwork is housed in the Museums Victoria in Melbourne. The paintings had never left the country before this traveling exhibition and required an official dispensation to do so.
This is the largest display of bark paintings ever mounted in the Western Hemisphere. Most of the 74 pieces, including two videos and 33 newly commissioned works, come from the holdings of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia, which organized the show along with the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Center.
“Madayin” — the word translates loosely to “sacred system” or a Keatsian notion of beauty as truth — is a sequel to “Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia,” an influential Asia Society exhibition in 1988 that inspired the media entrepreneur John W. Kluge to amass the largest collection of this art outside Australia, which he donated to the University of Virginia in 1997.
Unusually for the time, “Dreamings” was curated in consultation with Aboriginal artists. “Madayin” goes further. It’s a full-throttle collaboration, instigated by Wukun Wanambi, a Yolngu painter and filmmaker who died in 2022. Djambawa Marawili, the chairman of the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Center, was the other prime mover, urging a comprehensive exhibition after he first saw the Kluge-Ruhe holdings in 2015. The catalog is bilingual. “It is 55,000 words, the longest text in Yolngu Matha ever published,” said Henry Skerritt, a University of Virginia art historian and one of the show’s curators.
In a field that is open to charges of exploitation, “Madayin” has been exceedingly attentive. The show is organized thematically according to subject matter, with wall labels that focus on the significance of these paintings to the Yolngu.
“Of course, there are particular instances of white people exploiting Indigenous people, but when you come to situations like this exhibition, it’s utterly irrelevant,” said Terry Smith, an Australian art historian who didn’t work on this show. “It’s not only a matter that they’ve respected the agency of the two Indigenous elders — Djambawa Marawili and Wukun Wanambi — who conceived and shaped the whole exhibition. They also printed the catalog in two languages, which makes the book available to Yolngu people at Yirrkala.”
The perplexing conundrum is that while “Madayin” strives to be faithful to the intentions of the artists, those intentions are deliberately veiled, because the Yolngu shield their most sacred beliefs from outsiders. Indeed, even their women and children are left in the dark. In some of the early paintings that Thomson collected, the ceremonial designs that are painted on the chests of boys undergoing initiation and men performing rituals appear to be directly transposed. Several of the most beautiful paintings depict torsos covered in intricate patterns.
Very soon, an exchange program evolved in which paintings on eucalyptus bark were sold to middlemen at the local art center for knives, flour and sugar. Yolngu clan leaders, many of whom were themselves artists, resolved that they should be less forthcoming. They complicated the sacred designs with figures of animals and people to veil the secrets.
Yet there were counterarguments in favor of disclosure, since one function of the art was to keep venerable traditions alive by educating the young. The hidden references in the paintings also assumed a legal significance, as the Australian courts recognized Aboriginal land and sea rights on the basis of allusions to specific places in the designs.
This tension between what can be shown and what must be concealed animates Australian Aboriginal art. (Similarly, stippling and crosshatching function as scrims for the acrylic paintings made in Papunya, in the central desert northwest of Alice Springs, an important Australian Aboriginal art center that is not represented in this exhibition.) Not that this obscurantism is immediately apparent. To art lovers unfamiliar with the codes, the bark paintings look reassuringly familiar, because they resonate comfortably with Western abstract paintings.
Wanambi’s “Destiny” (2019) is a beautiful allover pattern that shimmers like one of Mark Tobey’s “white writings,” except that in this painting, the design is composed of tiny mullet fish, each with a black head and a white eye. Djirrirra Wununmurra’s “Buyku/Fish Trap,” 2019, is a geometric design reminiscent of the minimalism of Sol LeWitt, while Barayuwa Munungurr’s “Yarrinya/Yarrinya,” 2019, might be a Yayoi Kusama “infinity net” painting, were it not for the subtle silhouette of a whale that structures the design and the octopus lurking mischievously near the top.
These correspondences to modernist painting don’t escape commercial art dealers. Two Yolngu artists represented in “Madayin,” are currently showing at New York galleries. Both of them are gifted outliers from the precepts, dictated by tribal elders, of using only natural materials to make art.
Dhambit Munungurr is one of many women who, with the encouragement of a father or brother, have ventured into the realm of painting that was traditionally restricted to males. Some of the most striking works in “Madayin” are visions of nature as seen by women, such as the stars of the Milky Way, depicted as big circles with emanating rays against a spidery web, in Nyapanyapa Yunupinu’s “Ganyu’/Stars,” 2018; and the waterlily leaves and carnivorous-looking flowers gorgeously interwoven in Malaluba Gumana’s “Dhatam/Waterlily (Nymphaea),” 2019.
Munungurr, however, is in her own category. Seriously injured by an automobile accident in 2005, she lacks the physical strength to grind stones into the ocher pigments that are customary in eucalyptus bark painting. And so, she was permitted by clan leaders to use bright blue acrylics, which shout out in her work included in “Madayin” and in her concurrent solo show at Salon 94, “Dhambit — Rock of Ages.”
Painting more roughly and expressionistically than most of her colleagues, Munungurr specializes in aquatic scenes that lend themselves to her preferred color. In one, she portrays a story, perhaps apocryphal, of tribesmen rowing a canoe when a Japanese submarine approached the coast during World War II.
Gunybi Ganambarr also stretches the confines of Aboriginal bark painting by abandoning the bark altogether. Having labored as a house builder, Ganambarr displays a mastery of metal, using aluminum panels and industrial rubbish to create sculptures and reliefs. In one piece, “Spring Water Running Through Reeds” (2024) at D’Lan Contemporary, an East Side gallery, he perforated a geometric pattern onto a crumpled sign left on a golf course. The acceptance of detritus into Aboriginal art is an acknowledgment that the natural environment celebrated by the Yolngu has changed, and so the art that corresponds with it must follow.
“The land has everything it needs, but it could not speak,” Djambawa Marawili writes in the “Madayin” catalog, explaining the impetus that the Yolngu feel to make art. One requirement of the Aboriginal curators of “Madayin” was the inclusion of videos of singing and dancing, which back home accompany painting as expressions of the terrain. Here they provide an effective context for the exhibition. “We exist so we can paint the land,” Marawili continues. “That is our job. Paint and sing and dance so that the land can feel good and express its true identity. Without us, it cannot talk, but it is still there. Only silent.”
In these shows, it speaks — loudly and beautifully, even as it retains its mysteries.
Through Jan. 5, 2025, Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, Manhattan, (212) 288-6400; asiasociety.org.
Dhambit — Rock of Ages: Dhambit Munungurr
Through Nov. 2, Salon 94, 3 East 89th Street, Manhattan, (212) 979-0001; salon94.com.
Gunybi Ganambarr: Gapu-Buḏap — Crossing the Water
Through Nov. 8, D’Lan Contemporary, 25 East 73rd Street, Manhattan, (917) 405-7743; dlancontemporary.com.au.
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