Modern abstract and ancient culture meld

Aboriginal paintings speak across cultures in PICA exhibit

At one time, the media for painters wasn’t canvas — for the Aborigines of Australia, it was the ground or rock.

The artists really didn’t make the transition until Westerners showed them how, and brought them canvas. The “No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting” exhibit, June 20 through Aug. 20, hosted by the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, gives the public an idea of such ancient artistry and the dynamic painting movement.

“There’s controversy over it, and conversation,” says Kristan Kennedy, PICA visual art curator, of Aboriginal art on canvas. “As far as ethics and intent, the show was organized with great respect, and it involved the artists and tribes. It’s an interesting way to connect to such a unique notion of time and indigenous communities that we’ve wandered away from.”

The major national exhibit will be shown in four cities nationwide, and it’s the first opportunity for U.S. audiences to view the work of several Aboriginal Australian artists in depth.

An opening reception will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. June 20 at Mason Erhman Building Annex, 467 N.W. Davis St., and there’ll be regular gallery hours from noon to 6:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays and noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. For info: www.pica.org.

There will be nine artists featured, only one of them living, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, believed to be in his late 50s. The others were born before World War II. The paintings, 75 of them to be shown in Portland, were created between 1992 to 2012 — late in the artists’ lives, and during a time of experimentation and innovation among Australian Aboriginal artists, who transformed traditional iconographies into more abstract styles of mark making.

The artists featured in Portland were each known as a senior Lawman, a respected individual with knowledge of Aboriginal ceremonial traditions — exposed to the deepest tribal education, a developed person with unique style.

“It’s a contemporary artform in its own right,” Kennedy says. “They started painting late in life because that’s when they learned to paint.

“The work is really exceptional, and it defines itself outside the boundaries of Western art history, which is very pervasive, and it isn’t like jumping a tradition of modernism and post-modernism.”

The works are drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Miami collectors and philanthropists. A filmmaker, scholar, and winemaker in Australia, Dennis Scholl made several trips to Northern Australia, and he and his wife changed their collecting focus after encountering the wealth of talent in the region.

“The artists all have a common thread,” Dennis Scholl says. “Each had reached senior status in their communities and had become abstract painters who transcended the expectations of both the community and the art world.”

The late artist Paddy Bedford once told him that after having painted all of their mother’s “countries” (or territories) and father’s “countries,” the artists simply chose to paint.

Adds Scholl: “These painters have gone far beyond the boundaries of their community, their ‘country,’ and the very idea of their work as merely ethnographic. They are simply painters — some of the finest abstract painters this planet has ever seen.”

Exhibit organizers scheduled PICA as one of its destinations, and basically “an old warehouse” in Chinatown. Interesting choice, Kennedy says, choosing to work with the smaller nonprofit PICA and considering the other venues, all museums: Nevada Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum in Miami and Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History in Detroit.

The show took four years to organize.

“It’s going next to Pérez, a star architect’s building and a much-lauded museum,” Kennedy says.

“The collectors are some of the most voracious contemporary art collectors in the United States, and some are disenfranchised with where contemporary art is going, where the market is pushing it. Having PICA be one of the venues was a conversation about what makes something contemporary and have it contextualized in a new and emerging way. Even though it’s the same work, it’ll look different (at PICA), each incarnation is different.”

Kennedy loves the artistry.

She says: “To me it was really significant. When I saw the work it’s like my body exploded. It’s beautiful, it’s bombastic, gorgeous work. You see contemporary abstraction, emerging trends, and this work battles it one-on-one and you feel reconnected. What does abstraction mean? Looking at this work gives you potent answers. It’s a very diverse show, and each artist has a distinctive style.”