Art Gallery O-68 purchased authentic works by Australian contemporary artists from First Australian communities in 2012. Many of these have been sold during and after the exhibition in the gallery. We are now organizing a small exhibition in Depot-o68, a villa with 9 rooms furnished in Art Deco style with art for sale by artists who exhibited in O-68.
These artists from the First Australian communities live and work in the desert area of Western Australia, and Northern Territory. Originally these works were made in sand and on rocks. They are means of communication, language to tell each other about rocks and travels, family ties and the landscape, highly abstracted, “dreamings”, ceremonies, stories ephemeral in the sand. Only since the 1970s, through the work of art teacher Geoffrey Bardon, have comparable works been created with acrylic paint on canvas. Many museums and private individuals bought works and some people from the Aboriginal community accused the artists of revealing cultural secrets in their paintings.
We still have some works by female artists: Barbara DeRose, Doris Teamay, Karen Wright, Maringka Burton, Nellie Coulthard, Neta Knap, Pansy Hicks, Rene Sundown, Rita Rolley and a male artist Aaron Hayden. His works hang in the Western Australian Parliament House and in government and private collections. Women in these communities also had less access to the professional (art) market for a long time. Rene Sundown, however, has had exhibitions in Australia and abroad over the last 10 years. Sundown’s career gained momentum in 2024 after her debut solo exhibition at the Alcaston Gallery. In the same year Sundown was named as a finalist for three highly prestigious national awards, the Muswellbrook Art Prize, one of the leading prizes for painting in regional Australia; the Wynne Prize awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales; and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Awards (NATSIAA), presented by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.
We have 2 works by Sundown for sale: Tali (Sandhills) and Wiltja Traditional Bush shelter, both from before 2012. She still paints her memories of the land near Erldunda in the Northern Territory, where she grew up. In fields of cream and gold, intersected with bold linear compositional marks, her paintings recall the subtle color shifts of the Ngura Tali, Sand Dune Country of her childhood. Rene says “These are my thinking and painting memories. Memories of what I saw, sand dunes we played on. When I am painting, my feelings become strong and all my memories come back.” Sundown is a senior artist and long-time director of the Iwantja Art Center in Indulkana, South Australia. She is committed to passing on knowledge to future generations.
Most of O-68’s works are in the well-known dot painting style. The dots are made with pointed sticks that are first dipped in paint and then dotted onto the canvas. This is comparable to the original ‘land art’ stories in open nature where sticks were used to prick the earth and create mounds of colored earth.