Wurrdha Marra: First Nations Art

Wurrdha Marra

Wurrdha Marra - meaning 'Many Mobs' in the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung language.

The name comes to the NGV from the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation and supports the purpose of this space in sharing the work of First Nations artists, from emerging to senior figures, and across time and place.

For First Nations peoples around the world, art and design are part of a continuum where the past intersects with the present, different materials converge, and diverse perspectives come together.

The central role of art in passing down important cultural knowledge is celebrated in this display through the diverse approaches that artists take to maintaining and regenerating customary cultural practices and iconography while also creating new forms of expression.

The works included in this inaugural hang are by emerging artists as well as senior figures across both time and place. Each of these artists has in their own way been at the forefront in creating new forms of expression, and in maintaining and regenerating customary cultural practices and iconography.

Great individual artists, working in Aboriginal-owned art centres or independently after studying at art school, continue to shape and transform art in Australia, inspiring many others to follow their example.

Bark Salon

With over 150 works, Bark Salon is the largest-ever staging of the NGV's dynamic and expansive holdings of bark paintings. Exhibited on the ground floor of The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, within Wurrdha Marra, Bark Salon showcases the breadth of bark painting as a genre, tracing genealogical shifts in form, aesthetic, narrative and politic.

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EXPLORE BY THEME

Presented through a series of changing thematics, the works on display offer a series of visual dialogues as a way to explore how parallel innovations and continuities can continue to inspire new ways of thinking about art.

Ancestral sovereignty
Illuminating histories
Absence and presence
Form and materiality
First designers
Colour unbounded
Past shaping futures
Horizonless encyclopedias

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square
Ground Level, First Nations Art
Ongoing, free entry 10am-5pm