Desert Painters of Australia Part II

Through their surface resemblance to Western abstraction, [the paintings] effect a thrilling reversal of the rules of our museums and markets, and map a new kind of cosmopolitanism that spans ages and continents.
—Jason Farago, New York Times

Gagosian is pleased to present a sequel to the critically acclaimed Desert Painters of Australia, again drawing from the distinguished collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield. This is the first time that the work of Indigenous Australian artists will be shown in Los Angeles since Icons of the Desert at UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 2009.

Evolving out of ancestral rituals of mark making practiced for many thousands of years, such as tree carving, body painting, and sand drawing, painting on canvas is a fairly recent phenomenon for remotely based Indigenous Australians, linked to the forced displacement in the late 1960s of communities such as the Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, and Anmattyerr people to the Papunya settlement in the Northern Territory. This social upheaval inadvertently created a resilient hub of artistic production: out of communal work on canvas, wall, and ground emerged the movement now referred to as Western Desert painting.