Fondation Opale: ‘a haven for Aboriginal artists’ — in the Swiss Alps

The artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori first picked up a paintbrush in 2005, when she was 81 years old. She had been born on Bentinck Island, off the coast of Queensland, Australia, but in her twenties she was moved away, along with all the indigenous Kaiadilt people, after drought and sea-flooding rendered Bentinck all but uninhabitable.

The effect of that migration was devastating for Kaiadilt culture: much of their language and lore was lost. For the greater part of her life, Sally Gabori was cut off from the place where she grew up. Yet that place was the almost exclusive theme of the hundreds of paintings she produced in the last decade of her life.

An exhibition of work by Sally Gabori and Forrest Bess — Beneath the Reflections of the World — can presently be seen at the Fondation Opale in the Swiss mountain village of Lens (until 16 November). And it is utterly joyous to behold. Sally Gabori’s large compositions, made up of irregular swathes of bright acrylic paint, pulsate with youthful energy. It is hard to credit that they were painted by an octogenarian.

In the show there is a piece entitled My Country, dating from 2010, in which the roughly rectangular fields of primary colour are like an Expressionist take on some newly minted national flag. A work with the same name, from the same year, is made up of two unequal blocks of purple and pink, like a raggedy-edged Rothko or Clyfford Still. It could be a picture of magenta hills silhouetted against a glowing sunset, or an overhead view of dark water lapping on a coral beach.

One thing is for sure: it is not an abstraction. Encoded in these and other paintings are Sally Gabori’s memories of Bentinck — the sandbars and the rivers, the forms of eddies in the water off the coast. Many contain areas of black paint which, it seems, stand for human intervention in the landscape.

All Sally Gabori’s work in the show is drawn from the collection of Bérengère Primat, who has been collecting Aboriginal art for more than 25 years, and set up the foundation as a means to promote it, celebrate it, and to help define its unique place in the global scene. ‘This is a contemporary art gallery,’ says Primat. ‘It is also a haven for Aboriginal artists, a place where they can come and be loud, say whatever they want.’

Primat’s engagement with Aboriginal art began with an epiphany in Paris. ‘I went to a very small gallery in the 9th arrondissement which had an exhibition called Wati, Les Hommes de Loi. There were paintings and sculptures made by men — only men — from communities all around Australia: from the Kimberley, from Arnhem Land in the Top End, from the Central Desert also.

‘As I looked at the work, something strange happened in my body. I found myself thinking: “What is this?” It’s not that I cried or I laughed, but I felt something deep — I couldn’t say what — in the presence of this art that came from a culture I didn’t know at all.’

That first encounter led Primat directly to the other side of the world, to the makers of the art that had so moved her. ‘I started going two or three times a year, because I wanted to understand — but the more I grasped the basics, the less I saw the whole.

‘I was like a little child; it makes me laugh to think of it. But that naivety was good. I was spending a great deal of time with artists and their families, and they told me the stories that they were painting. And not only painting: they danced and sang the stories, too. At that time, many of the people didn’t like to have their photos taken, so buying the paintings that they made during my visits was a way of hanging on to special moments.

‘The first pieces I bought were souvenirs, in other words; but after 10 years or more, I had acquired a series of work. I didn’t like the idea of calling it a collection, but really there is no other expression for it. So I have accepted that word and the responsibility of care that comes with it.’

The collection now consists of almost 2,000 works, many of them epic in character: giant triptychs that would fill the gable end of an apartment block; collaborative endeavours, three metres wide, that contain contributions from dozens of separate artists; paintings as tall and imposing as cathedral doors.

The scope of the collection is far broader and more varied than the term ‘Aboriginal art’ usually implies. It encompasses urban art such as Gordon Bennett’s Notes to Basquiat: Shaman. That piece looks like graffiti, but contains elongated human figures such as can be seen on secluded rockfaces in Australia’s north-west. Alongside the jumble of sketches is a scribbled list of ‘brands’: ‘Wombat’, ‘Dingo’, ‘Stockman’ and even ‘Abo’.

Then there is a laconic conceptual billboard by Vernon Ah Kee entitled Your Duty Is to Accept Me My Duty Is to Tolerate You. That sentence is the entire painting, rendered in typographic lower-case black letters on a white background. It brings to mind Christopher Wool’s gnomic phrase-paintings, but here the letters and the colours are politically charged — and also beautifully wrought, as befits a master portraitist.

Within the collection there are, of course, pieces that go back to the big-bang moment in contemporary Aboriginal art when, in the early 1970s, indigenous people in the central township of Papunya began to commit their dreamings and their stories to canvas.

These works are in the manner that most see as traditional Aboriginal art: myriad dots in shades of ochre and rust-red; visual poems teeming with symbols such as arcs and concentric circles; mythic maps and visions of the dreamtime, populated with honey ants, emu tracks, snakes and possum. All of this ‘classic’ Aboriginal art is as rich in narrative and spirituality as a Greek iconostasis, and as hypnotic as a swinging pocket watch.

But there is also a strong thread of worldly protest in Primat’s collection. Ecological injustice informs some of the most striking and memorable pieces, two of which are on display at the foundation. In the foyer area, there is an installation entitled Shadow creeper, by Yhonnie Scarce. It consists of about 800 hand-blown pieces of glass made to resemble the tubers known as ‘yam daisies’, which are a staple food of indigenous people in South Australia. Suspended on almost invisible filaments, they look like floating, translucent chilli peppers. The effect is delicate, but also sinister, as every brittle piece has a sharp point.

The work is a response to the fact that Woomera, the artist’s birthplace, was used for a series of Anglo-Australian nuclear tests in the mid-20th century. Each yam in this tragic candelabra stands for a blighted life, and the use of glass can be understood as a reference to the vitrification of the sandy earth in the toxic heat of an atomic blast.

‘One of the things I love about this culture, and find so interesting, is that their way of fighting is through beauty,’ says Primat. ‘I am not at all an aggressive person, so I like the idea that you can make something beautiful that is very strong on belief, and speaks it.’

That approach to art and activism is also evident in the second permanent piece at the foundation, a work named Jidirah made by women’s collectives from the townships of Ceduna and Yalata. It is a naturalistic sculpture of a whale made from nylon cables and ‘ghost nets’.

These are nets that have been cut loose by fishing vessels, and this floating plastic mesh, which is ruinous for marine life, eventually washes up on shore. Local people collect it and weave it into vivid representations of the animals and corals that the nets themselves destroy. It is a grimly ironic sub-genre of Aboriginal art, and some of the most ambitious ghost-net pieces are here in the collection.

‘We brought a ghost-net sculpture and the artists from Erub Island, in the Torres Strait, who created it, to Venice during the Biennale,’ says Primat. ‘They explained that some of the animals that get caught in the nets are their totems. Having the sculptures right there lent political weight to their story.’

Primat is fond of quoting a remark made by the Surrealist André Breton: ‘Love, first of all. Later, there will be time enough to explore what one loves, until nothing about it is left unknown.’ The dictum neatly describes the course of her own relationship with Aboriginal art — and, as it happens, it was made in a preface to a book on Aboriginal art. That book was written by the Czech artist Karel Kupka, who travelled widely in northern Australia in the 1950s, and was among the first Europeans to see the work as something more than an ethnographic curiosity.

For Kupka, indigenous art was a modern phenomenon that demanded attention and respect. He amassed a collection of his own, and gifted a couple of pieces to Breton, presumably as a thank-you for the foreword. Those pieces hung on the wall of Breton’s studio on the Rue Fontaine for the rest of his life.

So the dialogue between Western and Aboriginal art has been going on for quite a while — something that the foundation is at pains to point out through its exhibition programme. Sally Gabori’s paintings in the present show, for example, share the space with borrowed works by the reclusive mid-century American artist Forrest Bess, whose complex personal cosmology was influenced by what he knew of Aboriginal rituals.

In 2022, Fondation Opale staged a show predicated on the fact that some previously unnoticed sketches of Aboriginal art had turned up in the papers of Yves Klein. The exhibition juxtaposed his ethereal blue ‘body prints’ with the eerie humanoid wandjina figures that abound in the rock art of the Kimberley. It also made the point that to use the body as a brush — or as a stencil, or a spray-gun — is a technique as old as art itself.

There are other instances of intersection and cross-pollination. Primat mentions that the work of Emily Kam Kngwarray — who represented Australia posthumously at the 1997 Venice Biennale — made a deep impression on Sol LeWitt when he saw it there (she is also the subject of a monograph exhibition at Tate Modern in London, until 11 January 2026). LeWitt never referenced her directly in his own painting, but by some kind of synchronicity, many of his snaking ‘irregular grids’ have the look of the Central Desert about them.

Something similar could be said of Forrest Bess. In the exhibition presently at the Fondation Opale, there is an abstraction that looks uncannily like a decorated Aboriginal shield, and another — a little landscape homage to Van Gogh — in which a ploughed field is rendered in zigzags of black and ochre that could be straight out of Papunya.

It is as if Aboriginal artists, millennia ago, discovered the archetypal shapes and forms that speak to the human soul. Concentric circles, for example, are one motif that runs through this collection. They are present throughout Aboriginal painting, and crop up in the visual vocabulary of every civilisation in every age. There must be a reason for that, and it must somehow be linked to the life-changing effect that a small selection of inscrutable paintings had on Bérèngere Primat when she saw them that day in Paris.

Art speaks to art, in other words, and it’s a conversation that happens across time and space. But all the same, aren’t the Swiss Alps an odd place for Aboriginal art to find a home?

‘Anywhere in Europe would be strange, and any kind of museum in this small village comes as a surprise,’ says Primat. ‘When Australian indigenous people come here, they feel… I was going to say they feel connected, but that’s not it, because they don’t know the stories. But they feel that there is a strength in the mountain landscape that interests them. And I love that.’

Beneath the Reflections of the World is at Fondation Opale in Lens, Switzerland, until 16 November 2025

Emily Kam Kngwarray, at Tate Modern, London, runs until 11 January 2026

The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art will be on show at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., from 18 October 2025 to 28 February 2026