Dibirdibi Country 2008

Sally Gabori made this painting, Dibirdibi Country, using what looks like acrylic paint in simple colours, but in a way that’s totally her own. It feels like she’s figuring out the world as she goes. The texture here is really key – you can see how she’s loaded the brush and laid down these big, kind of clumsy strokes of colour. There’s this tension between the flatness of the paint and the way those shapes feel like they're pushing forward, like they could almost become something. I keep coming back to that yellow patch, how it meets the black. There's no smooth transition, just this hard edge where the yellow stops and the black begins. It’s this meeting of light and dark that gives the whole thing its power. It reminds me of some of Milton Avery's landscapes, where he simplified everything down to these core shapes and colours. But Gabori brings something different, a rawness and an immediacy that's all her own. With her, it’s not about what the painting is, but what it does.