History Paintings features the works of renowned painters Gordon Hookey (Waanyi people) and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun (Cowichan, Hul’q’umi’num’ Coast Salish; and Okanagan, Syilx).
Set within the artists’ respective homelands of Australia and Canada, their works offer vivid and powerful reinterpretations of a painting genre typically associated with mythological and classical narratives. Gordon Hookey and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun embrace the monumental, confronting colonial histories from an Indigenous perspective with canvases as rich as they are expansive.
One of the most distinguished Australian artists of his generation, Gordon Hookey creates paintings that re-envision significant moments in his home country’s history. In MURRILAND! 2, key figures and events from pre-colonization to the present day are amalgamated into one continuous narrative, offering a radical revisioning of language, national identity and cultural value. Hookey’s tableaus collapse seemingly disparate concepts, combining satire and mourning, violence and beauty, and resistance with love.
Yuxweluptun’s work similarly confronts the construction of national histories, drawing on the visual language of landscape painting to expose the ongoing effects of environmental exploitation. Working in direct opposition to Canada’s Group of Seven, whose paintings helped to construct an image of the country as untouched wilderness, Yuxweluptun’s remarkable Global Warming: Wildfire Storms—the artist’s largest painting to date—reveals the contradictions embedded within these prevailing nationalistic and cultural narratives and compels us to look directly at the environmental devastation we have wrought.
Co-curated with Katina Davidson, Curator of Indigenous Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane.
Gordon Hookey was born in Cloncurry, Queensland in 1961. He currently lives and works in Brisbane. Hookey belongs to the Waanyi people and locates his art at the interface where Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures converge. He explicitly attacks the establishment and implicates our current political representatives. His style and approach is distinctive in its vibrancy and best known for its biting satire of Australia’s political landscape, its leaders and representatives. Hookey’s work combines figurative characters, iconic symbols, bold comic-like text and a spectrum of vibrant colours. Through this idiosyncratic visual language he has developed a unique and immediately recognisable style. Hookey’s perspective comes from a divergent, activist positioning – his work challenges hierarchies, skewering the status and integrity of the ‘elite’, while working to bolster the position of the marginalised and oppressed. Hookey is a core member of Brisbane-based Indigenous collective proppaNOW alongside fellow artists including Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee and Jennifer Herd.
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun is of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) and Okanagan (Syilx) descent and is one of the most outspoken and influential contemporary artists in Canada. Yuxweluptun presents his ideas through hard-hitting, polemical, but also playful artworks that now span a forty-year career. Yuxweluptuns’ works offer brutal critiques of issues such as land title, residential schools, and the destruction of the environment, making him a crucial voice in contemporary art. He lives and works on unceded, traditionaland ancestral xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories.