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Rover Thomas JoolamaRover Joolama Thomas "Marumaru" (Black One) Aboriginal Art 60x90 cm 19961996
1996
$69,000
£52,989.03
€60,724.78
CA$97,134.96
A$108,812.62
CHF 56,596.08
MX$1,327,289.38
NOK 720,543.40
SEK 679,421.07
DKK 453,233.12
About the Item
Rover Thomas Joolama (c.1926-1998)
Title: "Marumaru" (Black One)
Dimensions: 60x90 cm - Year: 1996
Natural pigments on linen canvas
Provenance: Art Centre Warmun (Stamp back of the Canvas)
Réf: RT0060
Biographie:
Rover Thomas Joolama (c.1926 – 1998) was born near Gunawaggi at Yalda Soak, in the arid desert of Western Australia. Rover Thomas’s father, an Aboriginal man living traditionally, was killed by white settlers.
He then followed an adoptive relative who led him to the Kimberley. Rover was a man of the desert.
At first, he worked as a stockman for nearly his entire life (40 years). However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of social and cultural upheavals occurred across the Kimberley region.
The owners of cattle stations dismissed hundreds of Aboriginal workers, who then settled in the white suburbs, where they established camps.
In 1974, Cyclone Tracy struck on Christmas Eve, destroying the city of Darwin. This city was seen by Aboriginal people of the Kimberley as the center of European culture, and since cyclones, rain, and storms were often associated with ancestral Rainbow Serpents, the elders interpreted the event as a warning from the ancestors, urging Aboriginal people to revive and strengthen their traditional cultural practices.
In 1975, Thomas had settled in Warmun, and in his dreams he was visited by the spirit of an aunt who had died in a car accident on a road flooded by Cyclone Tracy.
His aunt, who was being transported to a hospital in Perth, died in the plane over Broome in the western Kimberley.
From there, her spirit traveled across the Kimberley, visiting sacred and historical sites along the way until she reached her home in the east, where she saw the Rainbow Serpent destroying Darwin.
This story became the foundation of the Kurirr Kurirr ceremony, which the spirit of Thomas’s aunt had revealed to him.
Although he was not originally from the area, he became the custodian of this ritual, and his clan uncle, Paddy Jaminji, painted the first boards under Thomas’s guidance. In 1981, he began painting the emblems of Gurirr Gurirr.
It was an aesthetic shock—Rover painted with a fluidity that the old initiated Gija elders of the Warmun (Turkey Creek) community, where he lived, had never seen before.
Naturally, the Gija people turned to him to paint their memories of the massacres that continued until the 1940s.
Rover then created an extraordinary series on this theme, marked by its restraint and absence of figurative motifs. He soon became a major artist in Australia, pursuing a prolific and dynamic artistic career.
In 1990, he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale alongside another Aboriginal artist and pioneer of the urban art movement, Trevor Nickolls.
He was the subject of the major exhibition “Roads Cross”, with his paintings featured in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 1994.
In 1995, Rover and members of his extended family traveled with Kevin Kelly, director of Warringari Arts, to return to his birthplace on the Canning Stock Route, inspiring an impressive body of work. The following year, Peter Harrison of the Kimberley Art Gallery and Neil McLeod took Rover Thomas and Freddy Timms to Melbourne.
They stayed with McLeod and painted daily in his studio in the Dandenongs. McLeod, a close friend and associate of Lin Onus, whose own studio was less than a kilometer away, supported Thomas and Timms, enabling them to produce a large number of works. These works were sold by Kimberley Art in Melbourne, Utopia Art in Sydney, Fireworks Gallery in Brisbane, and several other venues, as well as to a network of private dealers and collectors who gathered around the artists during this studio period.
Upon their return to Turkey Creek, with guidance from Peter Harrison, Dave Rock, the Warmun administrator, introduced a payment scale for each artist to counter the exploitative payments from dealers who would show up at the retirement unit to commission and purchase artworks.
Coo-ee Aboriginal Art organized two printmaking workshops in the community in the late 1990s, and Rover Thomas, along with other important artists—both men and women—including Queenie McKenzie and Jack Britten, created acetates, plaster prints, and linocuts, which were published by Studio One in Canberra the following year.
During the workshops, many of their children made prints as well, mentored by the elder artists. At the time, the unfunded art center was run by Maxine Taylor, appointed by the Warmun Council. Known as Warmun Traditional Artists, it served as the community’s art center until 1998, when Kevin Kelly decided to incorporate it formally.
With a proper constitution and financial oversight, Turkey Creek’s growing art community was finally supported by an “official” art center—nearly two decades after the first internationally acclaimed paintings were created by its artists.
In his final years, Rover worked with all these organizations, and after Maxine Taylor left Warmun, he often visited her and painted at her home in Wyndham, where they had first met. At this stage of his life, he affectionately called Taylor Nyumun (aunt), just as he did Mary Macha, with whom he had started working 20 years earlier.
In 2000, Thomas’s work was featured among eight individual and collaborative groups of Indigenous Australian artists presented in the prestigious Nicholas Hall of the Hermitage Museum in Russia. The exhibition received a positive reception from Russian critics, one of whom wrote:
“This is an exhibition of contemporary art, not in the sense that it was done recently, but in that it is cast in the mentality, technology, and philosophy of radical art of the most recent times. No one, other than the Aborigines of Australia, has succeeded in exhibiting such art at the Hermitage.”
That same year, he was awarded the Patrick McCaughey Prize. His works traveled the world—Japan, USA, Germany, France, UK, Belgium, Denmark...
Australian museums held retrospectives. In 2001, one of his works sold for A$778,750 at public auction:
Title: All That Big Rain Coming from the Top Side
Year: 1991
Medium: Natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on canvas
Size: 180 × 120 cm
Auction: Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 09/07/2001, Lot 66
His work was exhibited in many national and international shows. Thomas himself visited Venice and New York, and in 1997, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Western Australia in recognition of his contribution to the arts.
He passed away on April 11, 1998, at the height of his fame. For some experts, he is the greatest Australian painter.
Collections:
Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
Berndt Museum of Anthropology, University of Western Australia
The Holmes a Court Collection, Perth
The Kelton Foundation, Santa Monica, U.S.A
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Collection Philippson, Belgium
Prix:
2011 Ranked 2/100, Most Important Australian Indigenous Artists (both living and deceased)
1993 Australia Post, Dreamings series, for International Year for the World’s Indigenous People, Kalumpiwarra-Ngulalintji (1984), reproduced on the $1 postage stamp.
1990 John McCaughey Prize.(Acquisitive) Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
1990 La Biennale di Venezia.Venice, Italy: Australian Representative, with Trevor Nickolls (b.1949)
Expositions:
Solo Exhibitions:
2004 Rover Thomas: I want to paint, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
2003 Rover Thomas – I want to paint, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
2002 The Paintings of Rover Thomas, Utopia Art, Sydney
1994 Roads Cross, The Paintings of Rover Thomas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
1994 Rover Thomas, Utopia Art, Sydney
Group Exhibitions, selection:
2021 « Aboriginalité », Collection Philippson, Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Bruxelles, Belgium
2018 « Les Derniers Initiés » Aborigène Galerie, Paris, France
2017 « Pigments » Aborigène Galerie, Paris, France
2016 Aborigène Galerie, St Germain-des-prés, Paris, France
2016 ‘Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia’, Hardvard Art Museums, USA
2013-2014 ‘Vivid Memories – An Aboriginal Art History’, Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France
2000 Nicholas Hall, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
2000 ‘From Appropriation to Appreciation: Indigenous influences and images in Australian Visual Art’, Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide, Australia
1996 ‘Nangara: The Australian Aboriginal Art exhibition-Ebes Collection’, Stichting Sint-Jan, Brugges, Belgium
1996 ‘Abstraction: Signs, Marks, Symbols’, National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Australia
1995 ‘Stories: Eine Reise zu den grossen Dingen’, Touring: Sprengel Museum Hannover, Museum fur Volkerkunde Leipzig, Haus der Kulteren der Welt Berlin, Ludwig-Forum fur Internationale Kunst Aachen, Germany
1994 ‘Identities: Art from Australia’, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
1994 ‘Power of the Land: Masterpieces of Aboriginal Art’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
1993 ‘Images of Power: Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
1992 ‘Crossroads-Towards a New Reality: Aboriginal Art from Australia’, National Museums of Modern Art, Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan
1990 Venice Biennale: Australian Representative, with Trevor Nickolls, Venice, Italy
1990 ‘Contemporary Aboriginal Art
1990 From Australia’, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow and touring United Kingdom
1989 ‘On the Edge: five contemporary Aboriginal artists’, AGWA, Perth, Australia
1986 ‘The Third National Aboriginal Art Award Exhibition’, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, Australia.
- Creator:Rover Thomas Joolama (1926 - 1998, Australian)
- Creation Year:1996
- Dimensions:Height: 23.63 in (60 cm)Width: 35.44 in (90 cm)Depth: 1.19 in (3 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:PARIS, FR
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU2847216010332
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