Angelina Pwerle: Bush Plum Dreaming

This is the first U.S. exhibition of Angelina Pwerle’s subtly optical, abstract paintings. Coming out of a history of Aboriginal art-making – painting on bark, stone or the human body – that is thousands of years old, Pwerle’s paintings are completely her own, transcending tradition, cultural specificity and ethnographic pigeonholes.

Pwerle paints with very limited knowledge of modern Western abstraction. Nonetheless, technical and aesthetic relationships can be found in the work of Yayoi Kusama, Jackson Pollock and Vija Celmins. In compositional elegance and spirit, her work relates to that of Agnes Martin – whose goal was to reach “zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth.”

Pwerle’s paintings are in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland; and The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan.