Salon 94 Highlights Australian Aboriginal Art in New York

The gallery is betting that growing interest in Aboriginal artists down under will spread to the most competitive art market on the planet.

New York gallery Salon 94 has begun the year with the exhibition Desert + Coast: Seven Elder Aboriginal Painters (11 January–21 February), which explores the work of senior Aboriginal artists from remote communities across Australia.

Spanning almost the entirety of Salon 94's expansive 89th Street exhibition space, Desert + Coast is the culmination of two years of discussions with curators in the United States and Australia as well as remote Aboriginal communities down under.

We wanted to present the 'most forward-looking, innovative, and imaginative painters of the continent,' said Salon 94 founder, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.

'Much Aboriginal art has a prescribed palette and set imagery passed down from generation to generation. We were interested in the artists who expanded this practice,' she said.

Among paintings by Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton, two senior women from APY Lands in northern South Australia, 'you feel as if [the artists are] casting spells,' Greenberg Rohatyn said.

In their communities, both Muffler and Burton are spiritual healers. Their paintings depict their 'Tjukurpa', the sacred religious philosophy of the Anagu people that has been handed down to them. In one collaborative work, entitled Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) (2023), a succession of concentric circular symbols, suggestive of the movement of a vast celestial body, are painted in muted whites and purples on a charcoal black ground.

The paintings of Mantua Nangala and Yukultji Napangati from the Western Desert are imbued with the stories of their communities. In Napangati's Marrapinti (2023), stripes constructed of hundreds of dotted horizontal lines appear to float above the surface of the canvas.

Nangala and Napangati 'pass down their stories through their painting,' and 'often paint while singing and telling stories surrounded by a circle of women and children,' Greenberg Rohatyn explained.

Desert + Coast is not Salon 94's first foray into Australian Aboriginal art. The gallery has represented Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, a Western Desert artist, since his first solo show with the gallery in 2015. The gallery caused a sensation at Art Basel Miami in 2017 when they exhibited one of his signature paintings of highly structured topographic-like forms constructed of finely dotted lines, alongside sculptures by Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha and the work of late minimalist and conceptual artist Robert Morris.

'Art and humanity happen all over the world, including in far away places, and it's our job to give [contemporary Aboriginal art] a platform,' said Greenberg Rohatyn.

With the Metropolitan Museum of Art having reportedly acquired three paintings for its new Oceanic Art collection before Desert + Coast even opened, Salon 94's longstanding commitment to contemporary Aboriginal art appears to have paid off.

'[These artists] clearly speak and paint in a universal language using signs and symbols that are global and recognisable,' said Greenberg Rohatyn. —[O]