History Paintings features the works of renowned painters Gordon Hookey (Waanyi people) and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun (Cowichan, Hul’q’umi’num’ Coast Salish; and Okanagan, Syilx). Set within the artists’ respective homelands of Australia and Canada, their works offer vivid and powerful reinterpretations of a painting genre typically associated with mythological and classical narratives. Hookey and Yuxweluptun embrace the monumental, confronting colonial histories from an Indigenous perspective with canvases as rich as they are expansive.
One of the most distinguished Australian artists of his generation, Hookey creates paintings that re-envision significant moments in his home country’s history. In MURRILAND! 2, key figures and events from pre-colonization to the present day are amalgamated into one continuous narrative, offering a radical revisioning of language, national identity, and cultural value. Hookey’s tableaus collapse seemingly disparate concepts, combining satire and mourning, violence and beauty, and resistance with love.
Yuxweluptun’s work similarly confronts the construction of national histories, drawing on the visual language of landscape painting to expose the ongoing effects of environmental exploitation. Working in direct opposition to Canada’s Group of Seven, whose paintings helped to construct an image of the country as untouched wilderness, Yuxweluptun’s remarkable Global Warming: Wildfire Storms—the artist’s largest painting to date—reveals the contradictions embedded within these prevailing nationalistic and cultural narratives and compels us to look directly at the environmental devastation we have wrought.
