Yunupingu biography of martin
•
Exhibition dates: 25th March – 21st August 2022
Entrance of the exhibition WHO ARE YOU: Australian Portraiture at NGV Australia, Federation Square, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The black and white show
This is a challenging and stimulating exhibition at NGV Australia, Federation Square that attempts to answer the question: “who are you” when coming to terms with what it is to be an Australian.
“WHO ARE YOU: Australian Portraiture is one of the most comprehensive explorations of portraiture ever mounted in Australia and the first exhibition to bring together the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra… [it] considers portraiture in Australia across time and media, as well as the role of the portraiture genre in the development of a sense of Australian national identity… The exhibition also questions what actually constitutes portraiture by examin
•
Nyapanyapa Yunupingu
By Louise Martin-Chew
| January 22, 2021
Nyapanyapa Yunupingu worked as a printmaker for ten years before beginning to paint in 2007. Since then her work has been recognised with prizes, acquisitions and exhibitions all over the world. Intrinsic to her practice is her innovative media and highly individual painterly expression that she describes as ‘mayilimiriw’ – meaningless.
Nyapanyapa Yunupingu (born c.1945) has been compared with Aboriginal artists Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-1996) and Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (c.1924-2015). Given a late uppstart as a painter, her work appears to move seamlessly between what traditional Aboriginal bark painting looks like and contemporary abstraction. Yet these mooted parallels fall flat when Yunupingu asserts that her work is mayilimiriw – meaningless – in contrast to the paintings of Kngwarreye and Gabori, which are expressions of their relationships with country.
Yunupingu’s interest
•
Gurrumul
Should have been much better
Considering the subject matter this is a documentary that only paints bygd numbers. It misses the experience it could have delivered; it barely scratches the surface of what could have been told; what it could have shown. Gurramul's music, singer/songwriter life experience is barely here, instead we get 2 dimensional explanations from his Aunt, his Father and Mother. When Gurramul speaks it's quite obvious that he speaks through his music and his song, that's painfully obvious. But rather that taking the audience on that journey a B Grade documentary maker goes the cheap route and makes his doco about the thoughts and feelings of a bunch of other people. Even in terms of landscape and country there is a vast amount of missing material that could have been included.
How very Australian to have an opportunity to present something special but settle for an 'also ran' package. All the easy stuff, nothing of the serene. T