DOWN UNDER Art from Australia

The exhibition draws on the ALBERTINA Museum’s extensive holdings of Australian art, encompassing around one hundred artistic positions. These holdings were recently expanded through a donation by the collectors Elisabeth Bähr and Lindsay Frost on the occasion of the museum’s 250th anniversary. Works by Australian women photographers such as Destiny Deacon and Tracey Moffatt complete the selection.

A key position within this broader constellation is held by Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910–1996), widely regarded as one of the most significant figures of Australian First Nations art. Remarkably, she began painting only in her late seventies. In the eight years until her death, she produced an expansive body of work grounded in a profound knowledge of her ancestral land. Her paintings articulate cultural memory and histories transmitted across generations, translating inherited knowledge into images of exceptional presence and force.