Vincent Namatjira

Western Aranda artist Vincent Namatjira was born in 1983, Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in the Northern Territory. He spent most of his childhood in Perth and returned to Hermannsburg after he finished high school. It was not until this time that Vincent learnt about his famous great-grandfather, Albert Namatjira. Vincent would watch his aunty, Eileen Namatjira, make pots in the Hermannsburg ceramic studio.

Encouraged by his partner, Vincent began painting at Iwantja Arts, in the Indulkana Community, Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the north-west of South Australia. With the guidance of other Iwantja artists, he first started painting in a traditional dot painting style. Vincent continued to develop his distinctive figurative style, expressively painting portraits of politicians, historical figures, athletes, musicians and members of his family and community.

His paintings offer a wry look at the politics of history, power and leadership from a contemporary Aboriginal perspective. Namatjira often positions himself in this history – out of place and out of time – and in doing so he helps us to reconcile our complex and traumatic pasts. Humour and parody are his tools for staging difficult conversations about Australian history and society.

Close Contact is a double-sided work of art, which won the Ramsay Art Prize in 2019. Executed in acrylic paint on plywood, this three-dimensional work breaks away from the artist’s familiar single-sided rectangular formats to make a painting that the viewer can interact with in different ways. To make the work, Namatjira made preparatory drawings directly onto plywood, working from life in the case of the self-portrait on one side and from reference images, including E. Phillips Fox’s Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, for the portrait of James Cook on the other side.

Cook and Namatjira reappear in a moving image projection made for the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2022, titled Going Out Bush. Through the work, presented as part of the Illuminate Festival, the colonial façade of the Gallery is temporarily relocated to the Central Australian desert. In its new home, ‘out bush’, the gallery building becomes a stage set for a vibrant and witty series of encounters. These include a football game with Namatjira’s favourite team performing spectacular marks. The Aboriginal flag takes pride of place in the work, supplanting the state’s emblem of the piping shrike carved in sandstone at the apex of the building’s pediment. The classical sandstone columns grow as ghost gums, the legendary eucalypts that appear in the work of Albert Namatjira, and Albert Namatjira’s iconic green truck traverses Country, weaving in light across the face of the building.

In a scene both dramatic and comic, strange things occur as night falls on Indulkana – Cook and Queen Elizabeth emerge and lose their heads, which bounce up and down the Gallery’s columns as though in a fair ground game. Their heads are replaced by Namatjira’s own as he inserts himself in a position of power, and slyly comments on a history of colonial collecting that has seen Aboriginal people treated as trophies and museum specimens. In the final scene, there is a gesture of peace and reciprocity whereby Queen Elizabeth and Vincent exchange bush treats – maku (witchetty grubs) and tjala (honey ants). Projected as a continual loop, the work repeats itself, suggesting perhaps that history has done the same.

By combining imagery and ideas from across time and place, Namatjira levels us all. In his words:

'I’m interested in painting strong figures and leaders, we see them on the news and wonder how and why they make their decisions. These powerful people are far away from us here on the APY Lands, but when I paint them it brings them right into the studio. I like to paint with a little bit of humour, humour takes away some of their power and keeps us all equal'.

Text written by Dr. Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Artistic Programs, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art in the Classroom, 2022.