An ambitious exhibition of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art from the Sordello-Missana Collection began at Spain’s Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM) on the 31^st of January with an opening attended by a healthy crowd of 200 and good press coverage. 

The exhibition features paintings by Australian Indigenous Western Desert artists such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Eubena Nampitjin, Bai Bai Napangarti and Tjumpo Tjapanangka, all of which were borrowed from the Sordello-Missana collection.

According to curators Ian Mclean and Erica Izett, the aim of the exhibition is to “position the art as contemporary art and take it out of the anthropological context that it is usually exhibited in in Europe”.   The curators only agreed to do the exhibition because the venue was a contemporary art museum and the collectors were also keen to present the art as contemporary art.

In order to enhance the theme that Indigenous art is contemporary art, the curators also include included the work of two urban-based artists not in the collection, a series of paintings by Judy Watson that were based on her residency in Barcelona a few years ago, and two videos by Christian Thompson.

Collected over the last five years by southern France based collectors Marc Sordello & Francis Missana, the Sordello-Missana collection consists of roughly 120 paintings of which 60 were chosen for the exhibition. The curators chose the paintings based purely on their aesthetic quality and revealed that their biggest challenge when putting the exhibition together was “to exhibit in a way that heightened the aesthetic energy of the work”.

It is their unique approach to the traditional primitive dot and line pattern aesthetic – an approach that embraces modern materials and methods – which makes the work of the contemporary Western Desert artists so engaging.  However, this approach also makes the Western Desert movement difficult to categorise.  Mclean states in the exhibition catalogue that:

 “in Paris, as in most European cities, Indigenous contemporary art is still collected in one institution, either a traditional ethnographic museum or a newly revamped one, and non-Indigenous contemporary art is collected in another, usually the museum of modern or contemporary art.  This is why this exhibition at IVAM is so important: it challenges the old patterns of State modernism”.

When asked whether the international opinion of Aboriginal art changed over the last few years, curator Erica Izett replied that “There was a major exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, a major museum of contemporary art, and now IVAM has been interested. Apparently a contemporary art museum in Lisbon is interested in also taking the show, so hopefully there is a growing acceptance in Europe that Indigenous art is contemporary art”

Contemporary Indigenous Art in Australia. Sordello Missana Collection will run until April 16 2012 at the The Valencian Institute for Modern Art.  For more information see the IVAM website