The Primavera 2019 artists are Mitchel Cumming (NSW/The Netherlands), Rosina Gunjarrwanga (NT), Lucina Lane (VIC), Aodhan Madden (VIC/France), Kenan Namunjdja (NT), Zoe Marni Robertson (NSW) and Coen Young (NSW).
This year's Primavera exhibition is curated by Sydney artist, Mitch Cairns whose own practice is centred on painting. Cairns has exhibited widely since graduating from the National Art School in 2006, his paintings have been awarded with the 2017 Archibald Prize and the 2012 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship.
For this group show, Cairns brings together an artist-led exhibition, curating the show to embrace each artist's original approach to their individual art-making practice. The exhibiting artists straddle various media combining painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, video and text-based works.
MCA Director, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE, said: “Primavera is a special occasion on the MCA's annual exhibition calendar as it acts as a springboard for many artists' careers, introducing the work of younger artists to a wider audience. Cairns has curated an exceptional group of talented young artists, including the work of two young Maningrida painters, which introduces the next generation of artists from this remote community.”
Each of the seven artists contribute a broad range of ideas to Primavera 2019. The selected artists all foster a strong dialogue on the common themes and conceptual ideas presented in the exhibition. Works on view explore ideas around the museum as institution, intergenerational relationships, and different notions of communication, both written and spoken.
On the exhibition, curator Mitch Cairns, said: “The artists participating in Primavera 2019collectively embrace cultural connection, poetic registers and the vast spectrum of painting in their articulation of new language forms. I have primarily been guided by my work as a painter, as well as an artist with an interest in language and the written word.”
Primavera 2019: Young Australian Artists is a free exhibition and on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Level 1 South Gallery, from 11 October 2019 – 9 February 2020.
Primavera 2019: Young Australian Artists –Artist biographies
Mitchel Cumming
Born 1988, Sydney. Lives and works Sydney and Arnhem, Netherlands.
Mitchel Cumming is an artist, poet and a founding co-director of KNULP Gallery, Sydney. His work is concerned with peripheral and recessional gestures of aesthetic framing and address. His practice frequently involves the establishment and/or manipulation of exhibition contexts, a process in which elements generally considered supplementary to artistic production become instead a primary material.
Rosina Gunjarrwanga
Born 1988, Kakodbebuldi, NT. Lives and works Mandekadjang and Maningrida, NT. Dankorlo clan.
Bangardidjan subsection. Yirridjdja moiety. Kuninjku language.
Rosina Gunjarrwanga is a painter and sculptor whose work is grounded in Kuninjku cosmological belief systems. Through her practice, Gunjarrwanga refines the Wakwak (crow djang) design that originated in the Mardayin ceremony and communicates to her clan, community and broader audiences the resilience and constancy of her culture. Through the use of line, grids and geometric, she invites the audience to contemplate the esoteric codes that can be read according to the various levels of knowledge that the viewer has acquired: from senior cultural custodian and uncle John Mawurndjul through to audiences who may recognise the spiritual and minimalist concerns of artists such as Agnes Martin.
Gunjarrwanga's father Ngarridj was a Dankorlo clan member and artist; however, as djungkay (cultural manager), Gunjarrwanga depicts the djang (totemic beings, sacred sites and ceremonial designs) of her mother's clan, the Kurulk. She is the daughter of the much celebrated artist Susan Marawarr, and she began exhibiting in 2009. Since her debut, Gunjarrwanga has been an exhibiting artist in a number of group exhibitions nationwide.
Lucina Lane
Born 1991, Melbourne. Lives and works Melbourne.
Lucina Lane pursues the interrelation of political, philosophical and poetic questions in artistic practice and production to explore the material and conceptual limits of painting. Working with an expanded approach to found materials, Lane uses text, existing artworks and exhibition contexts to problematise established concepts of subjectivity and authorship. Treating installation and exhibition as form, Lane quotes from a modernist aesthetic to negotiate the role of art, its function and potential.
Aodhan Madden
Born 1994, Melbourne. Lives and works Paris, France.
Aodhan Madden is an artist. Across the five or so years of his 'professional career', he has also been a retail assistant, an English tutor, a copywriter, an editor, a personal results coach, a bauble painter, a social research interviewer, an artist's assistant, a babysitter, an exam invigilator, and a production assistant at a souvenirs factory, among other 'roles'.
Kenan Namunjdja
Born 1989, Maningrida, NT. Lives and works in Mankorlod and Maningrida, NT. Kardbam clan, Kodjok subsection, Yirridjdja moiety, Kuninjku language.
Kenan Namunjdja is an Australian artist whose practice is intimately connected to his country, family and knowledge of Kuninjku cosmology and law. Namunjdja draws upon the djang (totemic beings, sacred sites and ceremonial designs) of the Kardbam clan estate to create paintings and sculptures which interweave rarrk (cross-hatching) and figuration to create rhythmic compositions. From a young age, Namunjdja was trained by his father, artist Bulanj S. Namunjdja (1965–2018), who was nationally and internationally recognised for his exceptionally fine rarrk and depictions of the site Bilwoyinj and the associated stories of kunkurra (wind) and kalawan (goanna). Namunjdja continues this strong legacy while innovating with new design elements and subject matter from his mother's lineage.
Namunjdja is the grandson of Peter Marralwanga (1916–1987), who was also an accomplished bark painter, a ceremonial leader and a key figure in the 1970s Outstation movement.
Zoe Marni Robertson
Born 1986, Adelaide, SA. Lives and works Sydney.
The artist has requested an artist biography not be included as a representation of her practice in this context.
Coen Young
Born 1988, Sydney. Lives and works Sydney.
Coen Young's practice spans painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. Predominantly working within the realm of painting, the artist's work is guided by a deep interest in material possibilities which, in recent years, have called upon and conflated historical methodologies more commonly used in the production of the photographic image. Young's paintings take as their subject various art historical tropes and tend towards discrediting the form of the artwork as image/painting/photograph as something resolute.
Born 1988, Sydney. Lives and works Sydney and Arnhem, Netherlands.
Mitchel Cumming is an artist, poet and a founding co-director of KNULP Gallery, Sydney. His work is concerned with peripheral and recessional gestures of aesthetic framing and address. His practice frequently involves the establishment and/or manipulation of exhibition contexts, a process in which elements generally considered supplementary to artistic production become instead a primary material.
Rosina Gunjarrwanga
Born 1988, Kakodbebuldi, NT. Lives and works Mandekadjang and Maningrida, NT. Dankorlo clan.
Bangardidjan subsection. Yirridjdja moiety. Kuninjku language.
Rosina Gunjarrwanga is a painter and sculptor whose work is grounded in Kuninjku cosmological belief systems. Through her practice, Gunjarrwanga refines the Wakwak (crow djang) design that originated in the Mardayin ceremony and communicates to her clan, community and broader audiences the resilience and constancy of her culture. Through the use of line, grids and geometric, she invites the audience to contemplate the esoteric codes that can be read according to the various levels of knowledge that the viewer has acquired: from senior cultural custodian and uncle John Mawurndjul through to audiences who may recognise the spiritual and minimalist concerns of artists such as Agnes Martin.
Gunjarrwanga's father Ngarridj was a Dankorlo clan member and artist; however, as djungkay (cultural manager), Gunjarrwanga depicts the djang (totemic beings, sacred sites and ceremonial designs) of her mother's clan, the Kurulk. She is the daughter of the much celebrated artist Susan Marawarr, and she began exhibiting in 2009. Since her debut, Gunjarrwanga has been an exhibiting artist in a number of group exhibitions nationwide.
Lucina Lane
Born 1991, Melbourne. Lives and works Melbourne.
Lucina Lane pursues the interrelation of political, philosophical and poetic questions in artistic practice and production to explore the material and conceptual limits of painting. Working with an expanded approach to found materials, Lane uses text, existing artworks and exhibition contexts to problematise established concepts of subjectivity and authorship. Treating installation and exhibition as form, Lane quotes from a modernist aesthetic to negotiate the role of art, its function and potential.
Aodhan Madden
Born 1994, Melbourne. Lives and works Paris, France.
Aodhan Madden is an artist. Across the five or so years of his 'professional career', he has also been a retail assistant, an English tutor, a copywriter, an editor, a personal results coach, a bauble painter, a social research interviewer, an artist's assistant, a babysitter, an exam invigilator, and a production assistant at a souvenirs factory, among other 'roles'.
Kenan Namunjdja
Born 1989, Maningrida, NT. Lives and works in Mankorlod and Maningrida, NT. Kardbam clan, Kodjok subsection, Yirridjdja moiety, Kuninjku language.
Kenan Namunjdja is an Australian artist whose practice is intimately connected to his country, family and knowledge of Kuninjku cosmology and law. Namunjdja draws upon the djang (totemic beings, sacred sites and ceremonial designs) of the Kardbam clan estate to create paintings and sculptures which interweave rarrk (cross-hatching) and figuration to create rhythmic compositions. From a young age, Namunjdja was trained by his father, artist Bulanj S. Namunjdja (1965–2018), who was nationally and internationally recognised for his exceptionally fine rarrk and depictions of the site Bilwoyinj and the associated stories of kunkurra (wind) and kalawan (goanna). Namunjdja continues this strong legacy while innovating with new design elements and subject matter from his mother's lineage.
Namunjdja is the grandson of Peter Marralwanga (1916–1987), who was also an accomplished bark painter, a ceremonial leader and a key figure in the 1970s Outstation movement.
Zoe Marni Robertson
Born 1986, Adelaide, SA. Lives and works Sydney.
The artist has requested an artist biography not be included as a representation of her practice in this context.
Coen Young
Born 1988, Sydney. Lives and works Sydney.
Coen Young's practice spans painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. Predominantly working within the realm of painting, the artist's work is guided by a deep interest in material possibilities which, in recent years, have called upon and conflated historical methodologies more commonly used in the production of the photographic image. Young's paintings take as their subject various art historical tropes and tend towards discrediting the form of the artwork as image/painting/photograph as something resolute.
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