Bark Salon

With over 150 works, Bark Salon is the largest-ever staging of the NGV’s dynamic and expansive holdings of bark paintings. Exhibited on the ground floor of the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, within Wurrdha Marra, Bark Salon showcases the breadth of bark painting as a genre, tracing genealogical shifts in form, aesthetic, narrative and politic. The exhibition features works ranging from the NGV’s earliest acquisitions, which showcase figurative, totemic, and Ancestral narratives, through to contemporary works by some of Australia’s most renowned painters. The space draws connections across time and place, celebrating the depth and scope of bark painting from more than thirty distinct Communities. The salon-style hang is a direct reference to the nineteenth-century European salon hang, an example of which is also on view at NGV International. In celebrating the medium of bark, Bark Salon offers a uniquely First Peoples response to this iconic mode of display.