The Face of the Centre

This is one of three exhibitions comprising “A year of Aboriginal Art” marking the newly opened gallery of Aboriginal and Oceanic Art. The National Gallery of Victoria takes the greatest pride in mounting the exhibition, The Face of the Centre: Papunya Tula Paintings 1971-84, the first time that an extensive exhibition of paintings of central Australian artists has been shown in this Gallery. It is the second exhibition in ‘A Year of Aboriginal Art’ at the Gallery and presents a contrast to the first exhibition, Kunwinjku Bim, which showed contemporary Aboriginal painters working in the traditional medium of bark painting.

Central Australian artists have achieved one of the most remarkable and decisive innovations in contemporary art and, rightly, stand at the forefront of contemporary Australian painting. In 1971 these painters began to use new media for art forms which traditionally had been executed in impermanent materials such as sand. By using acrylic paints on canvas or board they have managed to transfer a centuries-old tradition into a new and more lasting form. Yet all of the complexity and richness of their subject matter — the narratives, the feel for landscape and environment, the ceremonial and the mysterious, the profoundly spiritual awareness of existence — are retained in the new paintings. The artists are profound interpreters of Australian landscape, a landscape which is known from the inside, as it were. Both the past of the landscape, the great figures of the Dreaming which moved and shaped the land, and a sense of the land existing here and now for us are all contained in their complex, mosaic-like surfaces. The timeless land of the interior here finds timeless expression.

The National Gallery of Victoria is also extremely grateful to those who have generously lent their works to this exhibition for such an extended period. The National Gallery of Victoria has a firm policy of exhibiting and acquiring contemporary Aboriginal art. It is a proud moment for the Gallery to salute the achievements of the central Australian painters and their company, Papunya Tula Artists, and to ensure that their great contribution to Australian art, indeed world art, will be permanently recognized on the walls of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Annemarie Brody & Patrick McCaughey, The Face of the Centre: Papunya Tula Paintings 1971 – 1984, National Gallery of Victoria, 1985, p.3