Adrian Jangala Robertson
YALPIRAKINU
51
Yalpirakinu, acrylic on canvas x 51 cm 2024Adrian Jangala Robertson
YALPIRAKINU
2024
Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery
Introduction
We look up to mountains. They are grand, solid, monumental. They inspire awe, and in their ageless and unchanging presence we take comfort. They point to the heavens and lift our spirits. They watch over us. The mountains that Adrian Jangala Robertson paints are in Central Australia, and are over 350 million years old. Adrian himself has some of the qualities of a mountain: he has a powerful presence; he is still, but draws all eyes towards him. He has wisdom and is inspiring. His work lifts our spirits.
The mountains are alive and Adrian in his strong, luminescent brushstrokes captures the ancestral essence that animates his country, and the country of his forebears.
When, with the construction of the Central Australian Railway at the end of the 1920s, Alice Springs was opened up to white Australians from the urban centres some of the first visitors were artists - excited by the alien and vast landscape of the Central Desert, and the challenge of depicting it.
Adrian was born in sight of the great Central Australian mountain ranges. They are part of his art. And when you see him paint they seem also a part of him. And he seems a part of them. The valleys, gorges and waterholes of the mountains are where Adrian’s family Iive. And he paints his family in that ancient landscape. For Australian aboriginal peoples the landscape is not something separate. It is part of their being. they belong to it and it belongs to them. It was created in the Tjukurpa - or Dreamtime - when ancient ancestor-beings emerged from a dark silent space and sang the world into existence. the essence of these ancestors still lives on in every rock formation and water hole, indeed in every thing that exists on the earth that they created.
In the 1950s Sidney Nolan painted the great ‘dead heart’ of Australia in a series of memorable canvases. And in the the second half of the Twentieth Century many white Australian artistsincluding Russell Drysdale, Tim Storrier, and Fred Williams, sought to capture the majestic outback terrain. All of them, however, looked upon the land as something ‘other’ and strange: frightening; harsh. They looked upon it with awe.
Adrian Jangala Robertson looks at this same land with love. It is his land, and it is not alien or frightening. It is filled with the shimming essence of the ancestors, and has provided succour to generations of his family, over thousands of years. He paints his family in the landscape, and the essence of the landscape is in him.
Adrian grew up at the remote aboriginal settlement of Papunya, where his father, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa
was a leading figure in the creation of the new painting movement that began there in 1971. From childhood painting was part of his life - not only the body painting and groundpainting that was part of traditional ceremonial life, but also the great early masterworks of the Desert Painting Movement, produced by Kaapa, Clifford Possum, Tim Leura and others.
But, like all great artists, Adrian forged his own vision, drawing from both these traditions. There is an arresting truth in his bold self-portraits, his depictions of his family, and the portraits of the land that he and his family inhabit. If ever there was a testament to the inalienable right of aboriginal people to live in, and own, the land they have inhabited and cared for, over millennia, these paintings are it.
Rebecca Hossack acrylic on canvas, Family, 30.5 x 41 cm 2024
Yalpirakinu, acrylic on canvas
91 x 91 cm 2024
20.5 x 91.5 cm
Landscapes, acrylic on canvas 2024
61 x 61 cm 2024
2024Right:
122 x 122 cm
Family in Yalpirakinu, acrylic on canvas Yalpirakinu, acrylic on canvas
90 x 120 cm 2024
Family, acrylic on canvas
91 x 122 cm 2024
Family, acrylic on canvas Yalpirakinu, acrylic on canvas 61 x 61 cm 2024
46 x 91.5 cm
Yalpirakinu, acrylic on canvas
61 x 46 cm
Family in Yalpirakinu,2024 acrylic on canvas
Family in Yalpirakinu,2024 acrylic on canvas
91.5 x 25.5 cm
Family in Yalpirakinu(detail),2024
acrylic on canvas
61 x 25 cm
25 x 25 cm
Yalpirakinu, 2024 acrylic on canvas
Family in Yalpirakinu,2024
acrylic on canvas
61 x 122 cm
91 cm
Untitled, 2024 acrylic on canvas 61 x
Angelo Lagu, Rebecca Hossack, Liz Pederson and Adrian Jangala
Robertson (seated), Bindi Arts Centre 2023
ADRIAN JANGALA ROBERTSON
Adrian Jangala Robertson was born at the aboriginal community of Papunya, west of Alice Springs, in 1962. He grew up there during the early days of the Desert Painting Movement, and began painting from a young age. In 2002 Jangala Robertson joined the Bindi Mwerre Anthurre Artists, the innovative arts centre in Alice Springs that encourages and supports Aboriginal artists with disabilities. He has flourished there over the past two decades, achieving international recognition for his distinctive and intensely felt art.
The exhibition, , could not have taken place at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery London without the support of Bindi Mwerre Anthurre Arts Centre, Life Style Solutions, Arts NT and the Australian High Commission in London. Yalpirakinu
T: (+44) 20 7436 4899 info@rebeccahossack.com @rebeccahossackartgallery 2a Conway Street Fitzroy Square London, W1T 6BA