Ровер Томас: Живопись австралийского аборигена

Indigenous Australian artist (1926 1998)

Rover Thomas Joolama (1926 – 11 April 1998), known as Rover Thomas, was a Wangkajunga and Kukatja Aboriginal Australian artist.

Rover Thomas was born in 1926 near Gunawaggii, at Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route, in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. At the age of 10 Thomas and his family moved to the Kimberley where, as was usual at the time, he began work as a stockman. Later in his life Thomas lived at Turkey Creek. Rover Thomas and his Uncle Paddy Jaminji first started painting dance boards on dismembered tea chests for the Krill Krill ceremony in 1977. Thomas was inspired to paint by a mystical experience of being visited by his deceased kinship mother after the disaster of Cyclone Tracy, which he interpreted as a warning against the decline of Indigenous cultural practices. The Krill Krill ceremony included dances, songs and the painted boards tracing the woman’s after life journey from her death near Derby back to the place of her birth near Turkey Creek. He would return to the theme of Cyclone Tracy in a later work now in the National Gallery of Australia collection.

He was the subject of the important solo exhibition Roads Cross: The Paintings of Rover Thomas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra in 1994. In 2000, Thomas's work was among that of eight individual and collaborative groups of Indigenous Australian artists shown in the prestigious Nicholas Hall at the Hermitage Museum in Russia. The exhibition received a positive reception from Russian critics, one of whom wrote:This is an exhibition of contemporary art, not in the sense that it was done recently, but in that it is cased in the mentality, technology and philosophy of radical art of the most recent times. No one, other than the Aborigines of Australia, has succeeded in exhibiting such art at the Hermitage.

In 1990 Thomas was awarded the John McCaughey Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 1990 he became the first Aboriginal Australian to exhibit in the Venice Biennale, alongside Trevor Nickolls.