Paris, 9 October 2012
The exhibition titled “The origins of Aboriginal painting” is taking place at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris until 20 January 2013.
It is presenting for the first time in Europe a major artistic movement, first born in Papunya in the Central Australia desert, in the early 1970s. The works exhibited are at the origins of Australian contemporary painting, and of a great artistic movement: by reproducing ritual ephemeral paintings and patterns on wooden panels, the Papunya Aboriginal artists have created a new form of art. They have transposed their patterns on new materials in order to tell their ancestral stories (what anthropologists call “the time of dream”) and explain what their traditions and societies were like.
The exhibition has been designed as a retrospective of the major artists belonging to this movement. Displaying over 200 paintings and 70 items, it presents as well the iconographic and spiritual sources of the Papunya movement, and recalls its evolution from the first panels to large paintings of the 1980s and 1990s.