Bandigan Art is housed in a delightful Art Deco terrace in tree lined Queen Street, Woollahra, the centre of Sydney’s fine antique, gallery and cafe precinct. Two floors of intimate spaces offer the best examples of indigenous arts from around the country.
Directors John Colquhoun and Suzanne Lowe have a roving quirky eye for the newest hot art as well as showing major collectables from the established masters.
Unusual for an Art Gallery owner, John is a former barramundi fisherman and builder who worked across the Top End of Australia in the 1970s and 1980s and called in at many of the remote Aboriginal camps. He was smitten with a love of the bush life and respect for the beliefs and lifestyle of indigenous people.
Suzanne collected their first sculptures from Yirrkala while John was constructing an award winning Glen Murcutt designed house for Banduk Marika.
This project successfully motivated the move to culturally appropriate housing in the Top End.
John and Suzanne have now been collecting and exhibiting Aboriginal art for fifteen years and are known for their support for emergent community art centres. John and Suzanne sponsored and collected the magnificent feathered Morning Star poles shown at Sydney’s Maritime Museum and they have also mentored a number of artists including central Australian desert painters and Arnhem Land bark painters. They will be happy to show visitors their extensive digital archive of the artists, their communities and their participation in ceremonial life as well as photos of many of the sites associated with the paintings. John and Suzanne are interested in sharing their fascination with the land and stories the artists are expressing in their work
At any given time Bandigan will be displaying an exhibition of paintings from one of the remote community art centres as well as several rooms of the best fibre sculptures and carvings from Maningrida, paintings and weavings from Arnhem Land, new acrylic paintings from desert artists, finely painted hollow log memorial poles and carved Mimi spirits.
Bandigan regularly offers exciting eclectic work from its core artists, including wild figurative sculptures by Lena Yarinkura and Bob Burruwal from Maningrida, minimal elegant environmental dark earth ochre paintings by Mickey Durrng , electric sacred body paintings by Peter Datjin and new colourful landscapes and unusual ceramics from the key potters from the Arrernte community at Hermannsburg. For art lovers a visit to Queen Street is always a pleasure and Bandigan Arts is a must see stop along the way.
