Minnie Pwerle, Emily Pwerle, Molly Pwerle, Galya Pwerle at Château Shatto

Emily Pwerle, Minnie Pwerle, Molly Pwerle, Awelye Atnwengerrp (2005). Acrylic on canvas, 35.5 × 23.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artists and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.

Along the walls of Château Shatto last fall were alluring brushstrokes and dabs of the individually distinct and collectively harmonious Pwerle sisters, four artists from the Alyawarre or Anmatyerre language groups in central Northern Territory, Australia. All 13 abstract canvases in the show were painted in acrylic on canvas, starting with a black ground. Some layer intense primaries in long meditative strokes, others meditate on nuanced ochre curves nested and vibrating against each other. Against the black, the lines and loops become a handwriting that distinguishing one artist from the next. Together the work creates a collision and coalescence of perspective in the shocks of luminosity that erupt at the start of each stroke, fading as the paint emptied from the bristles. This collision of vibrant color amidst a dark expanse echoes the origins of Australia’s Western Desert Art Movement, born in the face of forced assimilation and repression, in which connection to land and tradition met with colonial expansion intent on seizing and erasing it.

Painted during regular work sessions between 2000 and 2008, each of the 13 paintings (including a collaborative work) bear the same title, Awelya Atnwengerrp. Referring to the women’s ceremonial traditions of the Alyawarre and Anmatyerre language groups, awelya rituals involve painting the upper half of women’s bodies with ochre motifs of nature and movement, followed by ceremonial song, dance, and the sharing of Dreamings, stories and embodied knowledge at the heart of identity and reality. The Pwerle sisters, in their 70s and 80s at the time these works were painted, had only just begun to translate their ephemeral bodypainting practices to the permanence of acrylic. The paintings glow with a mixture of both discovery and familiarity.

Of the four Pwerle sisters, Minnie (c. 1920–2006) was the first to pick up brushes and acrylic paint. For most of her life, she painted the bodies of women who participated in the awelyas. In 1999, when she was almost 80, her daughter, artist Barbara Weir, first provided her with art supplies after she expressed an interest in painting. Her emphatic circles and lines draw from her Dreamings and her connection to the land and its abundant fruits. As Minnie began to gain a following with her artwork, Weir encouraged Minnie’s three sisters to join at regular workshops held every six weeks, each completing their individual paintings in one sitting.¹ The result is a snapshot of what one imagines to be a focused state of family consciousness, repetitive strokes and dabs applied in close company yielding the ticking pulse of connection, using synthetic polymer paint to reach into thousands of years of Aboriginal tradition.

The artists of Australia’s Western Desert Art Movement first adopted new methods of preserving Indigenous heritage in the face of settler colonialism.² It began in Papunya, one of many Aboriginal settlements established by the Australian government in the 1950s with the intention to assimilate Indigenous families into groups with little prior contact with each other, to live like white Australians.³ In the face of active cultural suppression, this close proximity fostered considerable artistic cross- pollination as artists began to record ancestral Dreaming narratives, previously only told in ceremonies, in modern materials made available in the settlements.⁴ By 1972, the Papunya Tula artists began to express, in acrylic, traditional cultural motifs previously painted on soil or human skin.⁵ The Pwerles followed this tradition after a lifetime of practicing traditional bodypainting in their region of Utopia, which was formed by Aboriginal people.

Minnie’s six individual works in the exhibition displayed her characteristically straight and confident strokes and circles on a dark ground. Two vertical canvases from 2000, placed side by side, created a kind of narrative break between them. The left canvas conveys drift and displacement while emphasizing Minnie’s persistent mark-making: Rusty orange strokes rise and steady at the center, like wildfire smoke organizing into billows above a blaze. The right canvas keeps the rust-on-black palette, but its strokes undulate like long grasses in wind, interrupted by a burst of luminous blues and greens radiating from a blue-white loop in the upper left. A thin line of black underpainting left untouched at the edges underscores the painting’s limited space, heightening the tension of navigating a finite picture plane, rather than implying an infinite expanse extending beyond it.

The other sisters’ works display their own unique mark-making: Molly’s (born c. 1919) broad blue and white stripes cascade like water. Galya (born c. 1930) employs a dabbing technique, blotting vibrant unmixed color that, against the black ground, creates a blossomy dappled effect across three canvases that were hung together as a triptych. Galya’s canvases also leave a narrow border of black underpainting running along the edge, balancing visual abundance with a somber acknowledgment of finitude. Emily’s (born c. 1922) two canvases differ sharply in scale and color, yet both feature densely layered, multidirectional strokes whose restless details cohere into a stable, resolute whole. The larger work, over 18 feet wide, dominated the back wall of the gallery, a cosmos with interwoven reds and yellows flickering through a dense blue mesh, nebulous, nocturnal, evoking dreams and deep time. From a distance, its cross-strokes dissolve into an overcast night sky, woven to contain mysterious blooms of color trying to emerge.

A collaborative centerpiece the size of a classroom desk rested horizontally on a stand in the middle of the gallery. The dabs, stripes, and crossovers collide and complement each other while distinguishing their unique handwriting. Displayed as a tabled piece for the exhibition, the painting forefronts its making more as object than as image. But even more than its own making, the painting emphasizes the preservation of ceremonial practices through shared acts of gathering and making. Though Indigenous painting practices were born within colonialism, for the Pwerles, their blurred, mutated colors and forms resist the ordered engines of imperialism. Their paintings foreground collective energies that are able to resist assimilation and keep tradition in the present tense.

Emily Pwerle, Awelye Atnwengerrp (2006). Synthetic polymer paints on Belgian linen, 110.25 × 226.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.

Reuben Merringer is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and educator. His work explores liminality through the development of novel processes, utilizing the languages of painting, photography, sound, and video. He teaches at ArtCenter College of Design.

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