Image: Blak Dot Gallery, Brunswick
Blak Dot Gallery has corrected the dates for ‘The Papua New Guinea Sublime’, an exhibition of paintings by Lesley Wengembo that brings together Papua New Guinean landscapes and hyperrealistic portraits of Indigenous Papua New Guinean people. The exhibition will open on Saturday 29 August 2026 at Blak Dot Gallery in Brunswick, Melbourne, and remain on view through 20 September.
The opening event begins at 2pm and will include a special performance by West Papuan activist and performer Koteka Wenda and friends. The exhibition’s revised schedule was issued after the gallery identified incorrect dates in an earlier announcement.
‘The Papua New Guinea Sublime’ engages with, and resists, the traditions of European Romantic painting and the sublime. The gallery’s description identifies J.M.W. Turner as a particular reference point, especially the atmospheric and emotional qualities associated with his work. Wengembo’s paintings use that inherited visual language while shifting its focus toward the cultural and psychological weight of land.
For Wengembo, landscape is connected to memory, culture and belonging. The exhibition draws on his lived experience of Papua New Guinea and on his relationship with land as a repository of cultural knowledge, ancestral presence and personal memory. After relocating to Naarm (Melbourne), the artist’s connection to place became more complicated, with familiar landscapes reimagined through recollection and reflection rather than direct observation.
The resulting works present Papua New Guinea not as a single, fixed view, but as a series of places that continue to unfold. In the exhibition’s framing, Indigenous knowledge, colonial histories and contemporary identities coexist within the landscape. Romantic ideas of the sublime are consequently reconsidered through a Melanesian perspective, moving beyond nature as a source of awe to consider the emotional and cultural histories carried by place.
Wengembo is known for large-scale hyperrealist portraits of Indigenous Papua New Guinean people in ceremonial regalia, through which he has explored identity, symbolism and cultural continuity. The landscapes in this exhibition extend those concerns beyond the human figure, locating identity in the land as well as in portraiture. Wengembo completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School in Sydney and is undertaking a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University. He has said: “As a contemporary Indigenous artist, I try to capture an essence of what is still alive today, expressed through their faces, before it disappears.”
A further public programme will take place on Wednesday 16 September at 6pm, when Wengembo will join visitors to celebrate Papua New Guinea Independence. The free event will include an artist talk followed by traditional performances, music and food. Blak Dot Gallery is located at 33 Saxon Street, Brunswick, Victoria; the exhibition runs from 29 August to 20 September 2026.
