A Woman Defined

July 26 – September 6, 2019 | Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

There is something mysterious, mesmerizing about these desert landscapes. You have to be in tune with them to truly understand and love them, for they are not pretentious; they are brutal and honest. They have no way of decorating, ornamenting, or elaborating themselves. They are absolutely truthful to express what they are, and you either have to take them exactly as they are or you just have to pass them by and leave, step away from them, with the understanding and the acceptance that, plainly and obviously, these are not for you. They are beautifully naked, and this nakedness can shake your core, bluntly, telling the truth about you, as though you have been found out and now you have nowhere to hide. You have to stand in the middle of all these landscape paintings hanging all around you and burn, burn, and burn, until you are reduced to ashes.
There is something meditative, spiritual, and infinite about these desert landscapes in exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery. Standing in front of these paintings makes you feel as though you are standing in front of a vast ocean. You feel large and important, while at the same time, trivial, small, and insignificant, as though you are standing in front of where the universe and life itself all come to a glorious, magnificent end. Go and see the show to judge for yourself!

About

Through their surface resemblance to Western abstraction, [the paintings] effect a thrilling reversal of the rules of our museums and markets, and map a new kind of cosmopolitanism that spans ages and continents.
—Jason Farago, New York Times

Gagosian is pleased to present a sequel to the critically acclaimed Desert Painters of Australia, again drawing from the distinguished collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield. This is the first time that the work of Indigenous Australian artists will be shown in Los Angeles since Icons of the Desert at UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 2009.

Evolving out of ancestral rituals of mark making practiced for many thousands of years, such as tree carving, body painting, and sand drawing, painting on canvas is a fairly recent phenomenon for remotely based Indigenous Australians, linked to the forced displacement in the late 1960s of communities such as the Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, and Arrernte peoples to the Papunya settlement in the Northern Territory. This social upheaval inadvertently created a resilient hub of artistic production: out of communal work on canvas, wall, and ground emerged the movement now referred to as Western Desert painting.

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