Aborigines Exhibit at CS Northridge

With their vibrating pointillistic style and abstract images, paintings by contemporary Australian Aborigines look like modern art. But these works were taken straight from ancient “sand paintings,” and bespeak a culture that is thousands of years old.

“Dreamtime: Art of the Australian Aborigine,” starting Monday at Cal State Northridge, contains the Impressionistic artworks as well as traditional paintings, sculptures and artifacts, all characterized by the ancient concept of dreamtime.

“Dreamtime refers both to the aboriginal myths of ancestry and creation and to the topography of the land and its inhabitants,” said Louise Lewis, the school’s gallery director.

Thus, the earth-toned, modernistic works with squiggly lines, circles and dots are really “topographical maps of a desert area with geometric symbols representing a bush or an animal or a river,” Lewis said. “And these bushes and animals in turn might be reincarnations of ancestors or represent personal stories of a hunt or a legend. The layered meanings are just astonishing.”

Split between the school’s Anthropology Museum and its Main Gallery, the exhibit juxtaposes the modernistic works with traditional representative bark paintings and wood sculptures as well as such artifacts as baskets, tools, weapons, coffins and sacred and ceremonial objects.

“In looking at these works side by side, we’re simultaneously touching concerns that are traditional to Western art and to studies of anthropology,” Lewis said. “We see the value of the intermingling of the two.”

The objects in “Dreamtime” were lent by the Kelton Foundation, the UCLA Museum of Cultural History and the Pacific Asia Museum. Collector Richard Kelton will lecture about the exhibit on Monday at 10 a.m. in the Main Gallery.

WATCH YOUR HEAD: Routine roof repair work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Temporary Contemporary will force an early conclusion of its two current shows, said a museum spokeswoman. “The Image of Abstraction,” and “Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness,” will end Sept. 25 instead of Oct. 9 and the Temporary will remain closed for about 10 weeks, the spokeswoman said.

NEW BOOKS: “Fragonard: Life and Work” (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.: 382 pages) by Jean-Pierre Cuzin scrutinizes the artist with more than 750 illustrations including 102 full color plates and 450 black-and-whites in a chronological catalogue raisonne. Cuzin, of the department of paintings at the Louvre, writes up a thorough study of the 18th-Century French master.

SEARCH: Organizers of an exhibit on William Grimes are seeking biographical information about Grimes, who photographed film stars of the ‘20s and ‘30s for MGM studios. Friends, relatives or professional colleagues may contact photography and film historians John and Susan Edwards Harvith, 78 S. Professor St., Oberlin, Ohio 44074; (216) 774-6872.

SEARCH TOO: The Los Angeles Arts Council is accepting slides and photographs from Los Angeles County sculptors and painters for possible use in the council’s ongoing Art-in-Business Spaces, Sculpture Walk and “Catch a Rising Star” public art projects.

Information: (213) 552-3539.

ADD A FEATHER. . . : The J. Paul Getty Museum has recently acquired an ancient Greek vase, a 15th-Century illuminated book of hours and a 16th-Century figure study by Venetian artist Giovanni Antonio de Sacchis.

The vase, an attic black-figure neck-amphora, circa 530 BC, is attributed to a painter of the Medea Group. The book of hours, probably illuminated in Bruges between 1485 and 1495, was painted by the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book, an anonymous Flemish artist. The figure study, depicting the martyrdom of Saint Peter Martyr, was sketched about 1527.