Karma presents a survey of paintings by Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori. This marks the artist’s first New York solo exhibition, and will be open from February 27–April 12 at 549 West 26th Street. The Kaiadilt artist’s original, nonrepresentational iconography, based on interlocking shapes, passages of pure color, and visible brushstrokes, depicts her primary subject, Bentinck Island, in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, using the language of abstraction. Gestural marks trace the path of rivers; milky white forms indicate the incursion of cyclones; diagrammatic structures map the patterns left on the ocean floor by dugong grazing on seagrass. Rendered from memories of a home she was forced to leave, Gabori’s paintings are, in her words, “about a story place way out to sea.”

Gabori began painting in 2005 around the age of eighty-one. While she started small, working horizontally on a tabletop, the artist soon began using wall-mounted surfaces as large as nineteen-feet wide, moving her body across her compositions as she applied acrylic straight out of the tube and mixed wet on wet directly on her canvases. The resulting paintings, which she made in the last decade of her life, often focused on six significant locations, or Countries, as the Kaiadilt refer to them, on Bentinck: Mirdidingki, Dibirdibi, Dingkari, Makarrki, Thundi, and Nyinyilki. To make these works, Gabori drew on recollections of the island’s topography: its saltpans, reefs, and mangrove swamps; the freshwater pond where she collected waterlilies; the various rivers that run alongside where she, her father, and her husband were born. In 1948, Gabori and the rest of Bentinck’s population were forcibly relocated by Christian missionaries to the nearby Mornington Island. There, parents were separated from their children and the Kaiadilt people were forbidden from speaking their language. Gabori spent the rest of her life on Mornington, only able to visit Bentinck temporarily after the passage of Australian laws that restored Kaiadilt access to the land in 1994. 

Rock Cod Story Place – Freshwater (2005), one of the earliest works in this exhibition, visualizes Dibirdibi Country, the area of Bentinck associated with her husband Pat through the Kaiadilt system of naming people after places, as well as the Rock Cod, a being that, according to Kaiadilt cosmology, created the island. Concentric, ovoid rings of unmixed color radiate out from a central mass like the ripples of freshwater that flow into the island’s estuaries. The nearly neon Dingkarri (2006) associatively maps the contours of an islet that was an important fishing ground for the Kaiadilt community. Rather than a literal depiction of the Country’s appearance, Dingkarri is instead a pictorial manifestation of tides in flux: by mixing acrylics on the canvas itself, Gabori created morphing color fields that suggest movement. 

Though developed autonomously from Western art history, Gabori’s painterly syntax nonetheless evokes the oeuvres of the American Abstract Expressionists. Evidence of Gabori’s hand is everywhere in My Country (2009), which celebrates Mirdidingki, her birthplace. Working rapidly, she brushed together magenta and white to create a variegated field that morphs as it stretches across the vertical canvas. Close looking reveals a subterranean wash of yellow acrylic peeking through from behind Gabori’s urgent brushstrokes, complicating what at first appears duochromatic. Her jagged, brushy edges and embrace of unadulterated black call to mind Clyfford Still; her arcing, interlocking forms provoke comparison with Amy Sillman. The gestural Didirbidi Country (2010) reads as an exploration of the relations between shapes that abut each other, creating craggy borderlands at their intersections. Beyond its formalism, the work is a recollection of the stone fishing trap walls maintained by Kaiadilt women that branch off of Bentinck’s coastline. In addition to specific cultural meanings and associations encoded in paint, the works convey an affective charge that transcends geography, temporality, and identity.  Refracted through memory and mediated by dispossession, Gabori’s paintings are a living archive of a homeland.

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (b. c. 1924, Bentinck Island, Australia; d. 2015, Mornington Island, Australia) made vivid, emotive paintings that map the topography of her homeland of Bentinck Island. Over the course of only ten years, Gabori created a formally inventive body of work that visualizes her memories of Bentinck as luminous swaths of color textured with brushstroke. In 1948, following a year of droughts and floods on the island, Presbyterian missionaries forcibly relocated the Kaiadilt population, including Gabori, from Bentinck to the nearby Mornington Island. A period of exile initially assumed to be a temporary response to natural disaster quickly became a permanent state for the Kaiadilt people, and Gabori lived the rest of her life on Mornington. She began to paint around the age of eighty-one, in 2005, while undergoing occupational therapy at the island’s Arts and Crafts Centre, and quickly gained renown for vibrant acrylic paintings ranging in scale from intimate to monumental. Working both alone and in collaboration with her daughters and nieces, she created canvases that speak to global Indigenous struggles for sovereignty while also communicating through the universal language of abstraction.

In February, Karma will present the first solo exhibition of Gabori’s work in New York at the gallery’s Chelsea location. Her solo presentations include Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2022, traveled to Triennale di Milano); Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2017, traveled to Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne); Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne (2016, 2015); and Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra (2013). Her work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand; Foundation Burkhardt-Felder, Môtiers, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht, Netherlands; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria; Queensland Art Gallery; and University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane.