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New York Times

At TEFAF Maastricht, Indigenous Australian Art Takes Center Stage

In a first for TEFAF Maastricht, visitors to this year's fair will encounter a booth dedicated entirely to Australia's First Nations art. The show is set to feature over a dozen artists, working from the 1960s to present day, providing a broad picture of the contemporary Indigenous Australian art movement. The Indigenous people of Australia have had an artistic tradition for thousands of years, with rock art dated to around 30,000 years ago. What will be seen in the booth, though — from eucalyptus bark paintings, collected in the mid-20th century, to the canvases of Emily Kam Kngwarray and Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri — is adaptation and innovation, as artists began painting for an audience and embracing new mediums. Created against the backdrop of 20th-century colonialism, these artworks assert cultural identity and honor ancestral lands, totems and rituals. The exhibition at TEFAF, March 15-20, is being presented by D'Lan Contemporary, a gallery based in Melbourne, Australia, at a time of surging recognition for Aboriginal Australian art. Last year, the Indigenous Australian artist Archie Moore won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale with an installation that included a huge family tree. Later this year, the National Gallery of Art in Washington will host a large-scale exhibition of more than 200 Aboriginal artworks, which will then tour across the United States and Canada. 'Art has built important bridges between Aboriginal people and the wider world,' said Philip Watkins, a man of Arrernte, Warumungu and Larrakia heritage, and the chief executive of Desart, an organization that represents Aboriginal-owned art centers in Australia, in a phone interview. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.