Word: mawurndjul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...More than anyone else, John Mawurndjul has changed the face of bark painting. Adapting the cross-hatch technique of body painting known as rarrk, the son of a shaman's increasingly virtuoso barks have taken what was previously seen as a craft to the exalted realm of fine art: last year, he was accorded a career retrospective at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. If Mawurndjul is considered the Michelangelo of rarrk, then the MQB is his Sistine Chapel. Across 150 sq m of ground-floor ceiling, his sacred billabong at Milmilngkan ripples and sings; the rarrk's kinetic power...
...collect Arnhem Land barks as pieces of art, not anthropology; many of them will be displayed for the first time in MQB. "He was the first to recognize the individuality of each artist," says French-born Apolline Kohen, director of Maningrida Arts and Culture, creative home to John Mawurndjul. In fact, it was the 1989 Paris exhibition, "Magiciens de la Terre," which showed the work of Aboriginal artists alongside their Western contemporaries for the first time, which sparked Kohen's interest in the field. "From my experience in Maningrida, it's been very good being French," she says, "because they...
...four years, the Paris-trained curator has already helped reshape perceptions of Aboriginal art abroad. As well as assisting with the current Mawurndjul retrospective, now at Hannover's Sprengel Museum in Germany, this year Kohen took the first ever show of Aboriginal art to the Middle East, when "Identity and Country: Contemporary Art from Maningrida" opened at the La Fontaine Centre of Contemporary Art in Bahrain. "They were very curious," says Kohen. "They didn't get what they were expecting." No dot paintings or didjeridus; just the metamorphic power of rarrk. Her most heartening response? " 'Where's the Aboriginal...
...senses a cultural flowering just as important as any glassy cathedral to contemporary art. Here the fiberglass manta ray and skater-boy video of former "Primavera" artists James Angus and Shaun Gladwell sit happily alongside such contemporary jewels as Jean Tinguely's kinetic sculpture and bark painter John Mawurndjul's rainbow serpent. Here, and across Australasia, spring has sprung...
...clan lands, Mawurndjul's family mine a pure white clay, believed to be the essence of Ngalyod, which forms the foundation for his paintings. In recent years, Mawurndjul has allowed ever larger swathes of delek to shine through, as bright as the sun or the flick of a rainbow serpent's tail. Perhaps viewers should wear sunglasses to the show. Captured here is the white-hot flash of an art in motion; who knows where it might go next...