GREAT AFFINITIES

Pursuing a different collective vision, the works in this exhibition reveal often surprising connections and trace an interweaving skein of approaches that reveal a deep, ever-evolving engagement with abstraction.

Central to the exhibition is a 1971 painting by American artist Howardena Pindell in conversation with two paintings on canvas by Anmatyerre artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, one of Australia’s most important Aboriginal artists. Howardena Pindell’s spray dot paintings are among her most iconic works. The artist first created these paintings in New York in the early 1970s. Using various hole punchers and tools, she punched into discarded cardstock, manila folders and watercolor paper, the result of which she used as templates, spraying paint through the cracks across large-scale canvases to create shifting veils of color. These early paintings served as progenitors of much of her abstract work to follow. Often appearing predominantly as a single hue from a distance, in close examination the paintings reveal shifting sensations, one color pulsing with or against another, the energy of these components taking on a different appearance when observed closely. Pindell’s expansive canvases are the result of a continued personal exploration and  understanding of color, its cultural significance and mirroring in the natural world. 

Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s artistic practice was rooted in Indigenous Australian beliefs and a cultural responsibility to ancestral lands. Working in the remote central desert of Utopia, her œuvre was deeply inspired by her heritage, Anmatyerre spirituality, and surrounding landscapes. Beginning in 1988 - 89, when she was already in her seventies, Kngwarreye’s paintings, characterized by layered brushstrokes and dabs of paint, embody the vibrancy and rhythm of the natural world. Her chosen name, Kam, meaning the seeds and seedpod of the anwerlarr, or pencil yam, in her native language of Anmatyerre, is a central motif within her œuvre. Kngwarreye shifted the expectation that Aboriginal art must remain bound to traditional iconography and instead began to explore the open fields of color-based abstraction.

The 2003 painting from Sol LeWitt’s famous Brushstroke series reveals the influence Australian Central Desert painters had on his practice, including Kngwarreye, whose work he first encountered at the Venice Biennale in 1997. LeWitt described feeling a “great affinity” for Kngwarreye’s work and went on to become an avid collector of paintings by her.

Clifford Possum’s canvases are renowned for their complexity, detail and vibrancy. Works such as Lightning Dreaming (1996) are masterpieces of narrative art, weaving together the Dreaming stories of creation, ancestral beings and the laws that govern the natural world. Celebrating a shared human connection to nature and the stories that bind us all, Possum’s paintings transcend language and culture, speaking a universal language of emotion and beauty. André Masson’s Un jour d’automne (1960) also speaks to the land’s power to connect us all. Evoking a dreamlike landscape, autumnal colors dominate the canvas, with warm shades of orange, red and brown, evoking falling leaves and wooded landscapes. Scattered delicate touches of blue, green, purple and yellow suggest the lingering remnants of nature gradually yielding to the imminent arrival of winter. Un jour d’automne also reveals Masson’s fascination with symbols and archetypes. Repeated forms such as spirals, circles and curved lines recall universal symbols of life, death, creation and regeneration.

Like Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Sally Gabori started painting in 2005 when she was in her mid eighties and as an artist that came to painting late in life, her works bear witness to a boundless imagination and freedom of invention. Her colorful and expressive abstract paintings create a radical language that expresses sensations of place, life and cultural memory in diaspora. At the heart of Sally Gabori’s paintings is an incredible human universality. Although the works may appear abstract, they radiate emotional warmth in their celebration of her family and her home. The shapes of Who’s Afraid of The Red, White and Blue (2023) by Marina Adams also reveal a powerful internal rhythm beneath their surface simplicity. While purely abstract, the work’s organic, free-flowing patterns are redolent of landscapes.

Adams consistently infuses her colors with spiritual energy, imbuing her paintings with vitality. As the artist puts it, “Meaning and intellect in abstract art can be difficult to locate, as there is no narrative to lead us into it. It is like the voice itself. I use pattern and color to create the voice. And I use structure and form to channel it.”

Seeing Sally Gabori’s colorful and expressive abstract paintings in close proximity to Marina Adams’ contemporary contemplation of color, line, and improvisation, it becomes evident that although profoundly anchored in the history of her people, Gabori’s paintings bear witness to a remarkable pictorial modernity.
 
With no written language, Indigenous Australian cultures used a sophisticated and complex visual language which is fundamental to the expression of culture and identity. It’s in the making of the work that these artists harness the moment and capture space and time. Their paintings can operate in several realms simultaneously: at one level you can take the microcosm of a single seed or leaf, a loose matrix of Greek patterns based on the structure of the giant plant; and then, when you take a step back, the fine dotting and concentric circles are expanded to take up the entire universe.

 
The diverse group of artists presented in this exhibition have constantly, throughout their practices, tried to redefine the concept of abstraction and its possibilities for the painterly process. They have used art and color to transcend cultural boundaries and the limitations imposed by language. Most importantly, the exhibition’s geographic breadth demonstrates that artists from all over the world were exploring similar themes of materiality, freedom of expression, perception and gesture, endowing abstraction with their own specific cultural contexts.