PRIVATE TREATY - Timo Hogan
- hayley44920
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
TIMO HOGAN (1973 - ) Lake Baker (diptych), 2023 acrylic on linen 290 x 400 cm (overall); 290 x 200 cm (each panel) POA
Region: Tjuntjuntjara (Spinifex Homelands) WA Language: Pitjantjatjara
RPOVENANCE: Spinifex Arts Project, WA Cat No. 23-83 Salon Art Projects, Darwin NT Private collection, United Kingdom
EXHIBITED Tarnanthi - Timo Hogan: Kumpilpa Ngaranyi - Unseen, Light Square Gallery, Adelaide, October 2023Â
This is Lake Baker. This is a big place, a big lake. Big and white. That’s him there. That’s the Wanampi (water serpent). Wati Wanampi. Watersnake man. He is there at this lake. This is his place. He lives here. All this place is white and that watersnake man is white … Always the same place, Lake Baker. That’s because it’s my place. My father’s place. Timo Hogan for AGSA
Timo Hogan (b. 1973) was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, and is a Pitjantjatjara man of the Spinifex people. Raised between Mount Margaret and Warburton, he inherited deep cultural knowledge from his father and maintains a strong spiritual and ancestral connection to his Country. Now based in Tjuntjuntjara, a remote community in the Great Victoria Desert, Hogan is a leading figure in the Spinifex Arts Project—an artist collective established as part of the Spinifex people's land rights movement, known for its powerful visual declarations of custodianship and cultural authority.
Hogan’s work is centred entirely on his custodial responsibility for Lake Baker (Tjukurla), a remote salt lake near the Western Australian and South Australian border. His paintings are not landscape in a Western sense, but expressions of Tjukurpa (Ancestral Law), particularly the Wati Kutjara (Two Men) creation story and Wanampi, the ancestral water serpent believed to dwell in the lake’s depths. Hogan holds cultural authority over this site, and through his paintings, asserts that connection with solemnity and precision.
Minimal in composition yet immense in presence, his paintings evoke the expanse, silence, and power of the lake. Through refined use of negative space, fluid contours and a restrained, often monochromatic palette, Hogan creates works that are both visually arresting and deeply meditative. His paintings carry a distinct sense of place—mapping both physical geography and spiritual significance. This refined visual language has earned him critical acclaim, including the prestigious 2021 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award.
One of his most ambitious works to date, Lake Baker (2023), is a monumental two-panel painting measuring 400 x 290 cm. Using subtle layers of acrylic on linen, Hogan renders the shimmering salt lake with a sense of vastness and reverence. Soft white fields stretch across the canvas, interrupted by rhythmic lines and subtle tonal shifts that suggest the shoreline, waterholes, and ancestral movement. The work references the Wati Kutjara Tjukurpa and Wanampi without literal depiction—their presence felt through compositional balance, movement, and stillness. As with all of Hogan’s paintings, Lake Baker is not only a portrait of place but a living document of cultural continuity.
Held in major public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria, Hogan’s work affirms his place as a significant voice in contemporary Australian art—bringing a sacred, rarely seen landscape into national and international view, on his terms.
