CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Aboriginal Art
Art by Aboriginal peoples of Australia, from ancient rock painting and Arnhem Land bark painting to acrylics from desert and Utopia communities.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Aboriginal Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Aboriginal Australians have made images for tens of thousands of years, and much of that work stays bound to Country: to particular places, the ancestral beings who shaped them, and the law and song that go with them. Rock shelters in Arnhem Land and the Kimberley hold layers of painted figures, from the slender Gwion Gwion figures to the later Wandjina spirits. Arnhem Land painters working on flattened stringybark use fine cross-hatching, called rarrk, that makes a surface shimmer.
The 20th century brought new materials. Albert Namatjira's watercolours of the MacDonnell Ranges won national fame from the late 1930s, and acrylic painting on board spread outward from Papunya in the Western Desert after 1971, as painters adapted ceremonial designs of circles, tracks and dots for outside viewers. Emily Kame Kngwarreye of Utopia took up canvas in her late seventies and built vast fields of layered colour. Styles differ widely by community and language group.
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