Portrait of Bungaree
1991
- Medium
- colour screenprint hand-coloured with watercolour on 4 joined sheets
- Measurements
- 240.5 × 154.6 cm irreg. (image) 241.0 × 160.0 cm (sheet)
- Place/s of Execution
- Melbourne, Victoria
- Edition
- ed. 2/6
- Inscription
- printed in relief (in image) l.c.: PORTRAIT of / BUNGAREE
inscribed in pencil l.l.: 2/6
inscribed in pink paint l.r.: Condorito 1996.
inscribed in pencil l.r.: Juan Davila 1991. - Accession Number
- P36-1992
- Departments
- Australian Prints / Australian Prints & Drawings
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992 - Gallery location
- Not on display
- About this work
-
Using varied visual references and strategies of pastiche, Juan Davila’s work makes a complex commentary on social politics. Davila references both Australian and South American history, art and popular culture to explore the fluidity of identity in the wake of colonisation. This work makes reference to Bungaree, an Australian Aboriginal man who lived among white settlers in his Indigenous community; texts by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss; and eighteenth-century Spanish depictions of the archangel as colonising conquistador. Davila manipulates various styles and genres to question the role of art in representation.
