At last a spectacular tome for the many fans of Vincent Namatjira, one that will also win him new admirers. Originating from an exhibition at the Tarnanthi Festival and the Art Gallery of South Australia, this beautifully laid-out book from Thames & Hudson Australia captures the humour and intense vision of Namatjira’s career to date.

The fascination with Vincent Namatjira – Indigenous painter of figures, portraits, and lately landscape – lies in the way he twists the human visage to tell stories. (He fittingly won the Archibald Prize in 2020, with a portrait of former AFL player Adam Goodes.) He is not a caricaturist in the usual sense of the word, although caricature is invoked in his wry use of political figures, from Paul Keating to Donald Trump, Elizabeth II to Vladimir Putin. But unlike newspaper caricatures of such figures, Namatjira’s message is ambiguous. This is because it’s hard to tell if his distortions are deliberate, or result from his being ‘untrained’, like a latter-day Douanier Rousseau or fellow Iwantja artist Kaylene Whiskey. For me, they are deliberate in the way that Francis Bacon’s figures were made with deliberation. Bacon drew on pre-existing images, such as Velázquez’s painting of the pope, for his often grotesque, distorting reinterpretations. Photographs, be they snapshots of boyfriends or Muybridge’s wrestling men, were another great inspiration.