REVIEW: Yolngu Power, the art of Yirrkala

Yolngu Power is a dazzling display of the signature shimmering light generated by the characteristic Yolngu optics of fine linear patterning.

Number: YP-2025YAL_035 Installation view, Rumbal series, 2022–23, Yolŋgu Power: The Art of Yirrkala, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Naala Nuru, 2025. All artworks © the artists, Buku Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala. Photographed by Diana Panuccio / Art Gallery of NSW

Presenting an eighty-year art history of sixteen east Arnhem Land Yolngu clans represented by the Yirrkala Art Centre Buku Larrnggay Mulka, it recalls the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Crossing Country that some twenty years ago traced a nearly 100-year history of west Arnhem Land art. This historical format pushes against the usual focus on Indigenous contemporary art that forty years ago freed it from the limited primitivist category of ethnographic artefact, releasing it for the aesthetic, political and financial rewards of fine art.

The paradigm of contemporaneity keeps on giving, but Yolngu Power locates the source of its power as innovative fine art in the very artefacts that were once considered ethnographic and primitive. An underlying dialectic of continuity and change joins several generations of innovative art practice into a cultural bloc or nation. This historical consciousness of looking back while moving forward is a recurring theme. At every turn we learn that the modern idea of fine art embraced by Yolngu reworks the religious themes of ceremonial art.

For example, the first circular room of clan designs—twenty-two paintings commissioned in 2023—echoes the powerful bark paintings commissioned by the anthropologist Donald Thomson in the early 1940s that first introduced Western audiences to Yolngu art. From there the exhibition follows a rough chronology. On the way, the juxtaposition of works from different-generation family members reiterates this historicist dialect of continuity and change. This challenge to the current intellectual vogue of contrasting Western historicism with an ahistorical Indigenous worldview is overdue, especially since the contrast unwittingly resurrects a core tenet of Western primitivism.

Yolngu Power is the Australian version of Madayin, which has been touring the USA for the previous three years. The Madayin catalogue is far superior to that of Yolngu Power, but both exhibitions tell a similar story. Conceived in strategic terms as the soft power of international diplomacy, they transform Yolngu culture into political claims of national independence—though what it means for the history and idea of Australian art remains a moot point.

The national constitution of Yolngu identity is first flagged in the display of the different clan flags in the gallery foyer and powerfully asserted in the first room of clan designs that identify each clan as an independent nation. Here “Yolngu” is an umbrella term for a federation of independent nations linked by kin relations, ancestral epics and a shared cultural language, retold in continuing modernising idioms or styles. The chronological layout highlights these generational styles which speak to the collective spirit or zeitgeist of each generation while enabling the individual spirit of each artist to come forward.

As in all art, we feel this individual spirit most readily in the contemporary generation. Despite the relatively small number of artists, there is enough individual stylistic differences to satisfy a good range of tastes. Not surprisingly, the current stars Gunybi Ganambarr (b. 1973) and Nonggirrnga Marawili (c. 1939–2023) are well if not over-represented. Each has a forceful expressive style, but my own taste tends to the retrained subtleties of Garawan Wanambi’s (b. 1965) austere abstraction.

Garawan’s mixed ochres produce unexpected colours that are applied with unmatched masterly control and tonal pitch in layered repeating patterns that gently pulse to create a watery tidal space, as if breathing in and out in a slow measured rhythm. When painted on an uneven bark surface the effect is most mesmerising, though even when the support is a flat machined board (as in two paintings here), one’s gaze is held in hypnotic rapture. It induces a mindful meditative quietude that for me recalls a feeling (though not the look) I associated with Matisse’s paintings.

Garawan’s two paintings on board and two larrakitj (painted between 2013 and 2021) have the same title Marrangu, which refers to a place where freshwater meets saltwater. This intermingling of difference is a metaphor for creation and fecundity, and also dispute resolution and renewal, themes relevant to the legacy of colonialism that Yolngu fine art addresses.

Fittingly, Garawan’s art is exhibited near those of Barayuwa Mununggurr (b. 1980), as both paint with a meticulous exactitude and feeling for layered spatial abstract patterning, with Garawan’s classical compositions set off by Barayuwa’s more baroque energetic geometry. This is appropriate to Barayuwa’s main story: the saltwater environs and transgressive themes of the ancestral whale story of Mirrinyungu at Yarrinya. Striking in both artists’ work is how the precision of their mark-making belies the ambivalent space of their paintings in which is felt the hidden but increasingly emergent forces that Yolngu call buwayak. In my mind they are the ancestral currents that in powering the Yolngu past, present and futures, encapsulate the take-away message of Yolngu Power.

EXHIBITION
Yolŋu Power, the art of Yirrkala
21 June–6 October 2025
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Image courtesy of the artists, Buku Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala and Art Gallery of New South Wales

Ian McLean is a professorial fellow and the inaugural Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History, University of Melbourne.

This article was first published in Artist Profile, Weekend Review, 20 September 2025