Untitled 2, 2013, Warwick Thornton
Pigment prints, 2 parts: 100cm x 100cm, 15cm x 15cm
Provenance: Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.
Exhibited: Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2013.
Living and working in Alice Springs, Warwick Thornton is an award winning film director, cinematographer and visual artist. His art is preoccupied with evaluating Indigenous Australians’ place within both colonial history and in the modern world. By using multiple mediums, he is able to explore these themes visually within time and space. As a film director, screenwriter and cinematographer, Thornton has received numerous awards, including the Caméra d’Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and the IFA Cultural Film Award at the 2009 Berlin Independent Film Festival for his debut feature film ‘Samson and Delilah’ (2009) (1).
Warwick Thornton contributed ‘Untitled 2’ to an exhibition of works at the Anna Schwartz Gallery titled ‘Debil Debil’ to mark the 20 year anniversary of Tracey Moffatt’s film premiere of beDevil. Each artist was tasked with reckoning with the presence of ghosts of the past in their works. Thornton chose to present a priest, a cowboy and a policeman, but not as we have ever seen them before (2).