5 March 2022 to 12 February 2023 | WA Museum Boola Bardip, Perth | Free
Papunya Painting: Time and Place highlights the National Museum of Australia’s extraordinary collection of Western Desert art.
This touring exhibition features nine key works from artists who experimented radically with colour and style in the telling of their Dreaming stories. In the 1970s and early 1980s they created a body of work that transformed understandings of Aboriginal art.
Papunya was a government settlement that forced people of different language groups from across a vast desert region – Anmatyerr, Warlpiri, Pintupi, Kukatja, Luritja and others – to live together.
These people found Papunya a strange, confronting and sometimes dangerous place. A group of artists responded to life there and their links to distant homelands by creating a painting style and visual language that has been embraced worldwide and recognised as among Australia’s foremost cultural achievements.
These paintings were first displayed in 2008 as part of the exhibition Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert exhibition.
Acknowledgements
Papunya Painting: Time and Place is a touring exhibition developed and presented by the National Museum of Australia.
The National Museum of Australia and the Western Australian Museum share an ongoing commitment to connect the many strands of Australian experience and history. Papunya Painting: Time and Place follows an earlier display of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route at WA Museum Boola Bardip.