Karen Brown Fine Art opens second gallery in Smith St Mall
A new gallery has opened in Smith Street Mall offering a bright new space for locals and visitors to experience stunning contemporary art in the centre of the CBD. LOOK INSIDE.
A new gallery has opened in Smith Street Mall offering a bright new space for locals and visitors to experience stunning contemporary art in the centre of the CBD.
Karen Brown Fine Art, a gallery currently representing seven Indigenous Territory artists, opened its second location in Darwin City late last month.
Gallery owner Karen Brown said there had been a steady stream of visitors coming through the gallery space since it had opened.
“Bringing some great colour and art into the mall has been wonderful,” Ms Brown said.
“It’s a place to meet and catch up and reconnect.”
The space, located opposite the Galleria, hits a balance between being able to show large scale works without losing its intimacy.
“I really love large paintings, and the artists that I work with have great success with a large canvas, a big place to place the idea. So having a space to show larger works was also a motivation,” Ms Brown said.
The gallery’s inaugural show is the Rra-Mardu Collection, displaying a selection of Indigenous artists including Isa McDinny, Nancy McDinny, Stewart Hoosan, Selma Hoosan, and Julian Brown.
Isa McDinny is a Yanyuwa woman and the eldest daughter of well-known artist Dinny McDinny.
She said seeing her works exhibited in the space made her feel connected to her late father and their cultural stories.
“It makes me happy, because my father is with me, he tells me – in a dream, or something like that – ‘you do (paint) this one, or that one, that’s your own country’,” she said.
Ms McDinny has a series of paintings titled Warngkurlarli, after her fathers country, her art mapping out stories of the land.
“The nomads came from Kununurra, they were walking together, all along, and they found these rocks,” she said.
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