Modern art collectors in Britain and Europe have, until recently, been relatively uneducated about the potential of contemporary Aboriginal art. But that is changing, as a selling exhibition of Aboriginal paintings from Australia’s Bidyadanga tribe, held this year at the Nevill Keating gallery in London, illustrates. “This was my second exhibition,” says curator, Jennifer Guerrini-Maraldi. “It’s like a snowball rolling and this time nearly half the paintings were sold in two weeks.” Indeed, paintings by the most coveted Aboriginal artists command more than A$1m (£425,000).
The Bidyadangas are the latest Aboriginal group to emerge as serious artists. Aborigines have been paintings rocks, bark and their own bodies for millennia but an initiative set up by the Australian government in the early 1970s encouraged them to paint on canvas as a way to help them perpetuate their threatened culture. Since then, the growth in value of Aboriginal art has been phenomenal, says Tim Klingender, an expert in the subject at Sotheby’s. “Prices have now caught up with other contemporary art.”
Works by Western Desert dot painters, such as Emily Kngwarreye and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, now sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds and Klingender predicts that growth will continue at an “exponential” rate. To date, the most expensive work of Aboriginal art sold at auction is Rover Thomas’s “All That Big Rain Coming From Topside” (1991), which fetched £325,000 in 2001. But, for its Aboriginal art auction to be held in Melbourne on July 24, Sotheby’s has placed an estimate of £755,000 to just over £1m on Tjapaltjarri’s “Warlugulong” (1977).
“Australian art galleries have been collecting since the 1980s but now a few other museums around the world have started to buy. When that happens, private buyers follow,” says Klingender. Robert Hughes, a leading art critic and author of The Shock of the New, describes contemporary Aboriginal art as “the greatest art movement of our time”.
Also backing the trend is art dealer Josh Lilley, who has organised an exhibition at the Bargehouse Gallery on London’s Southbank, due to open September 21. It will feature a group of artists from Arnhemland, near Darwin in Northern Territory, whose figurehead is John Mawurndjul. Now in his mid-50s, Mawurndjul recently helped decorate architect Jean Nouvel’s Quai Branly museum of ethnography in Paris and has appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He works on bark and free-standing logs. The organic quality gives it, in Lilley’s view, a contemporary edge that buyers appreciate. “None of the works on sale will cost more than £30,000, which is a snip compared to a lot of contemporary art and not much in relation to the prices being realised by established Aboriginal artists,” says Lilley.
Rebecca Hossack, whose gallery holds an exhibition of Aboriginal art each summer, explains that “there are over 400 different Aboriginal languages, and even more distinct peoples. Each group has its own cultural traditions, fostered over tens of thousands of years – traditions of music, dance, ceremony and painting. Each people evolved its own iconography, its own forms of representation for paintings that were made on rock shelters, on bare torsos and on the shifting sands.” Though the shapes may only have meaning to the tribe who use them, Aboriginal art codifies memory and knowledge – of landscape, the spirit world, tribal history.
The Bidyadanga tribe, for instance, lived in the Great Sandy Desert, in an area so remote it is identified only as being around Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. After a decade of devastating drought, the tribe was forced to move away in the 1950s. They went to the coast. But the tribal land is intensely important to Aboriginal people and the artists of the Bidyadanga have been painting it ever since. The transition from desert subsistence to coastal living introduced many rich greens and ocean blues into their art as well as the pinks and yellows of coastal flora. The mix and variation of this vibrant palette, combined with a memory of hot reds and yellow spinifex of the harsh desert landscape, has produced unique art.
“The Bidyadanga are happy people,” says Guerrini-Maraldi, who aside from organising an annual exhibition also sells Aboriginal art on her own website. “They are always singing as they work. Their speech itself is like singing. The bright bluey-green which features in many of the paintings is the exact colour of the Indian Ocean.” She also notes that they have abandoned the ochre palette that they used to use when painting bark and bodies for ceremonial purposes. Many of the Bidyadanga pictures are landscapes imagined from above to reveal the secrets of the earth, or as Guerrini-Maraldi puts it: “Think Superman flying over the country with X-ray vision.”
The activity of painting in the tribe is a surprisingly controlled business as only certain members are allowed to do it so that the patterns of dots, surface lines and underpainting retain their secret meaning.
Painting is also an activity particularly associated with old age as many artists do not start until they are in their 60s or 70s. This was the case with Emily Kngwarreye, from an Aboriginal group living at Utopia, 250km north-east of Alice Springs. Since her death in 1996, when she was in her 80s, her paintings have been selling for more than A$1m.
Things are changing here too, however. Within the Bidyadanga community, for instance, very different artistic personalities have emerged. Jan Billycan is an elderly medicine woman and the forms of her paintings suggest internal organs, blood cells and micro-organisms that she can never actually have seen. More unusual is Daniel Walbidi, who is still only in his 20s. He was discovered seven years ago when he walked into an art gallery in Broome, Western Australia, to ask for an exhibition. The gallery agreed and provided him with professional materials. His paintings now sell for between £8,000-£12,000.
Walbidi grew up as one of the “saltwater people” in the coastal land that the Bidyadanga now call home but has inherited an understanding of the mysteries of the tribal lands. Last year the old people took him back to the sacred land that they had left half a century ago and for the first time he saw the landscape he had been painting for eight years, imagined only from songs and stories passed down from older generations.
Clive Aslet is editor-at-large of Country Life
In the frame
Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi, www.jgmart.co.uk
Josh Lilley, Bargehouse Gallery, Southbank, London SE1, tel: +44 (0)7957-200 570; www.joshlilleyfineart.com
Rebecca Hossack, 28 Charlotte Street, London W1, tel: +44 (0)20-7255 2828; www.r-h-g.co.uk
Sotheby’s, 926 High Street, Melbourne; tel: +61 3-9509 2900, www.sothebys.com
