The Fondation Opale presents UTOPIA, an exhibition exploring the Sandover region in the heart of Central Australia (Northern Territory), a landscape of vast rolling grasslands, spinifex, sacred springs, waterholes, winding riverbeds, mountain ranges, and hills. The exhibition takes visitors into the Utopia community and its surrounding homelands, birthplace of a major artistic movement that emerged in the early 1990s.
Bringing together works by Anmatyerr and Alyawarr artists, the exhibition celebrates Country through topographical perspectives, ceremonial scenes, sacred grasses, medicinal bush plants, and Dreaming stories that are deeply connected through culture, ceremony, language, and land. Rich in colour and symbolism, these paintings evoke a landscape shaped and traversed by Ancestors over thousands of years.
- Ada Bird Petyarre (c. 1930–2009), Body Paintings, unknown date (detail). Acrylic on linen canvas. Bérengère Primat Collection, courtesy of Fondation Opale. © Ada Bird Petyarre / Aboriginal Artists Agency Limited / 2026, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Vincent Girier Dufournier.