Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

A spectacular tome

Vincent Namatjira’s humour and intense vision
by
April 2024, no. 463

Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira

Thames & Hudson, $90 hb, 256 pp

A spectacular tome

Vincent Namatjira’s humour and intense vision
by
April 2024, no. 463

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.

Vincent Namatjira

Vincent Namatjira

edited by Vincent Namatjira

Thames & Hudson, $90 hb, 256 pp

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.