The collaborative exhibition of celebrated senior Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara artists and Ngangkari (traditional healers) Iluwanti Ken and Betty Muffler powerfully emphasises the importance and necessity of their work.
While both distinct in their style, Ken and Muffler’s large-scale works are luminously moving and ultimately restorative to view. Ken is renowned for her ink drawings, created using punu sticks, depicting mother eagles hunting. For Ken, birds like the walawuru (eagles) and patupiri (swallows) share lessons for Aṉangu women about how to care for children.
The exhibition also showcases the artistic collaboration of Ken and Muffler with epic and densely layered paintings that detail panoramic images pulsing with culturally significant symbols of their Country and tjukurpa (Aṉangu cultural heritage, encompassing past, present and future).
View, in pictures, Ken and Muffler’s evocative and illuminating collaborations and solo works for Mara Ala – Open Hands.
Mara Ala – Open Hands
Iluwanti Ken and Betty Muffler
Jan Murphy Gallery
12 July—30 July
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
In an expansive show at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, seven leading Australian ceramic artists have reinvigorated one of Australia’s oldest museum collections by creating a contemporary potter’s quarter—known as the ‘kerameikos’ in Ancient Greece.
Julie Mehretu’s first solo exhibition in the southern hemisphere, now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, attempts to harness the urgency and energy of the Ethiopian-born New Yorker’s multilayered painting practice.
Whether beloved pets or superstitious omens, animals have always existed in art. The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia’s latest exhibition is paying tribute to two of the most beloved animal figures: cats and dogs.
