Gallery Sakiko New York is pleased to present Songlines, an exhibition featuring five works from the 1960s by Aboriginal Artists. The installation will further contain works by Donald Silverstein [1932-2004] and the two contemporary painters Bryan Osburn and Willy Richardson.

Painted on bark, the Aboriginal artworks on display were made by Aboriginal Australians based on traditional culture. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples of Australia have been living continuously on the Australian continent for more than 40,000 years, making this the oldest continuous living culture in the world.

Works like the ones on display here often refer to The Dreaming, the sacred time when ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings formed The Creation. Captured in dazzling abstract designs, many of these paintings portray ancestral beings, such as the Rainbow Serpent or The Mountain Devil Lizard, for example. These images are not only meant as physical descriptions of the ancestral beings, but also as portraits of their spiritual powers. To the Aboriginal peoples, the paintings themselves are believed to possess the power of the ancestral being they reflect.

In recent months Bryan Osburn has moved away from pure abstraction towards a complex mélange of abstract and surreal elements. Geometric forms and crisp patterns have become infiltrated with abstracted but recognizable images of animals and plant life. Bryan Osburn lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Based in Santa Fe, NM, Willy Richardson creates works that employ translucent banners of color, transforming them into dense and heavily layered compositions. While a strong vertical movement defines the overall rhythm, it is the unique palette of each work that makes up its emotional core.

Donald Silverstein explored the fine line between figuration and abstraction in painting. Abstract Expressionism, Surrealist details and Sci-Fi had as much of a significant impact on his work as did his knowledge of primitive art. In his paintings and works on paper expressive color fields are fused with mere hints of referential objects, evoking rich visual and textural information.