REVIEW: Imants Tillers and Fierce Paradise: Conversations with Aboriginal Art

Linday Frost's review of Fierce Paradise: Conversations with Aboriginal Art at the Museum Im Schafstall, Neuenstadt am Kocher is now live on Artlink.

Artlink is a critical space for writing on contemporary art and ideas, producing three thematic issues a year (both in print and digitally), which engage with the visual art worlds across Australia and the Asia-Pacific. Frost is an Australian researcher, collector and writer based in Speyer, Germany. 80 contemporary indigenous Australian artworks from his collection with Elisabeth Bähr were recently generously donated to the ALBERTINA in Vienna.

Frost's review from the 20th of May, 2026 describes the opening of 'a new chapter of Australian art' with the exhibition Fierce Paradise's inclusion of seven posthumous collaborative paintings with respected indigenous artist Michael Nelson Jagamara, as well as the importance of Tillers' exhibition to a German audience.

'Some are intrigued. Some are excited. Some are vexed by cognitive dissonance. Those are the main responses from German visitors to Wildes Paradies / Fierce Paradise, which features 66 artworks by the Sydney-born Imants Tillers, including nine works Tillers made in collaboration with Warlpiri artist Michael Nelson Jagamara ... Ten works from the Tillers’ family collection, by Jagamara and other Aboriginal artists Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Peter Pijaju Skipper, Sue Elliott, Sam Tjapanangka, plus two works by Anglo-Australian Tim Johnson, give further context. A criss-crossing of cultures, histories, and themes of Aboriginal, German and Latvian diasporas are signature to this exhibition, co-curated by Hubert Sawatzki and Tillers’ German-based daughter Isidore Tillers.

The importance of this exhibition to a German audience arises from its alchemical mix of cultures, styles and iconography, exposing expatriate wounds in identity and national heritage. It shows how appropriation art can excise deeper than surface imagery borrowed from others, down into the underlying meanings imbued by history (Australian, Latvian, German, Indigenous Australian).’

Lindsay Frost

20 May 2026

Museum Im Schafstall

Neuenstadt am Kocher, Baden Württemberg, Germany

26 October 2025 – 31 May 2026