Sally (Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda) Gabori

Painted at Mirndiyan Gununa Arts Centre, Mornington Island, Queensland

Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne

Private Collection

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 26th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, August 14 - October 25, 2009

Judith Ryan AM, Senior Curator, Art Museums at the University of Melbourne writes with regard to the artist's recent exhibitions in Paris and Milan:

"In July 2022, I attended the opening by the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese of Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. It was extraordinary to experience this visionary exhibition designed by Adrien Gardiere in which Gabori’s daring paintings harmonised with the simple abstract planes of the exhibition spaces and the natural world beyond. The Fondation Cartier building designed by Jean Nouvel in 1992 is surrounded by a wilderness garden cultivated over the past three decades. The ground floor high-ceilinged galleries are bathed in natural light, flooding through the expansive windows. Here I viewed Gabori’s vibrant paintings of Thundi against luxuriant foliage and blue skies from within and glimpse her daring canvases from the exterior garden. 

The subterranean galleries, by contrast, are hermetically sealed low-ceilinged interiors devoted to Gabori’s audacious representations of Dibirdibi and Nyinjilki, which proclaimed the power and physicality of paint and the luminescence of colour. A space in which huge 2 x 6 metre Dibirdibi canvases stretched across the perimeter walls enclosed the viewer in a palpable vision of a special story place on Bentinck Island, which Gabori painted with untrammelled freedom in diaspora.

Thirty monumental canvases, rigorously selected from the Alcaston Gallery archive by Thomas Delamarre and Juliette Lecorne presented Gabori painting at the height of her powers. Moreover, the paintings were displayed as great art, free of extended texts and wall labels. The works’ titles and dates were printed in white vinyl lettering on the floor: this is a mark of the artist’s unique achievement. 

To see Sally Gabori’s work being exhibited as art in Paris, the centre of modernism, is the stuff of which dreams are made. Given the circumstances of Gabori’s life, her exile from Bentinck Island in her early 20s and her chance encounter with art in her eighty-first year, one could never have scripted such a happening. From the time of her first encounter with brush, acrylic and canvas, Gabori was compelled to paint, driven by a sense of having nothing to lose: art gave meaning and purpose to her existence in diaspora. Her canvases of ambitious space, broken colour and vigorous gesture startle the viewer into abandoning their preconceived notions of Aboriginal art. At the Fondation Cartier, the dramatic spectacle of Sally Gabori’s energetic brush had an aura all its own, her body of work was shown as art of power and consequence on an international stage" (ibid).