Albertz Benda is hosting a new star at their glitzy Los Angeles home, behind Chateau Marmont. Through February 1, 2025, the gallery is sharing an exhibition of eight abstract landscapes by renowned Aṉangu singer and painter Zaachariaha Fielding. The eponymous presentation marks the first-ever U.S. solo show by Fielding, who’s best known around the world as the voice of Electric Fields, the pop-techno duo that brought Australian Aboriginal language to Eurovision for the first time this past May.
At the rate Fielding’s painting practice is progressing, however, singing may not remain his number one claim to fame.
Fielding got into music long before he became a painter, as a child growing up amidst the disenfranchised desert of Central Australia’s Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. He transcended his tiny Mimili community in a big way during 2011, when his X Factor audition wowed judges and audience members alike. He and keyboardist Michael Ross went on to form Electric Fields in 2015.
Years ago, Fielding was readying himself for a trip to America to further his music career. Then, lockdowns intervened. “I had nothing to do, like everybody else in the world,” Fielding told me over the phone. “I produced work after work after work, and then I had an elder offer me a solo exhibition. I was like, ‘what is a solo exhibition?’”
By Fall 2022, Fielding had a solo show of looming, dense abstractions with Brisbane’s buzzy Jan Murphy Gallery. The following spring, he won the prestigious $50,000 Wynne Prize, awarded annually for either the best landscape painting of Australian scenery, or the best figure sculpture by an Australian artist. Eventually, Fielding linked up with Albertz Benda via a mutual collector.
The paintings across his eponymous U.S. debut are part of the ongoing series that constitutes Fielding’s entire practice. His abstract, bold gestures jump off the linen they’re painted on straight away. Fielding himself compared his compositional process to instinctual choreography. “I don’t want to become anything; I just want it to be something,” he said. The artist often employs actual iconography, like the serpent he placed on a bridal gown during a collaboration with cult Aussie fashion house Romance Was Born this fall. Here, however, flashes of figuration tend to resolve back into pareidolia—even if the silhouettes of eyeballs remain persistent.
Moments of intense detail do actually emerge in this show, though—further complicating viewers’ attempts to determine what they’re really looking at. Each one of the works on view features wavy lines comprised of small, dense text all drawing from intergenerational aboriginal songs that bear wisdom about the environment and beyond.
Through abstraction, Fielding hopes to portray internal and external landscapes at once. “How do they work as a collaboration?” he asked.
“We’re very powerful creatures, but we limit what we can and cannot do, and that’s the most frustrating thing about this whole experience of being a human,” the artist continued. “You do have a sense of, ‘I am not having the full experience with this life.'” Individuals are constrained by the monotonous expectations of marriage and mortgages, and populations remain restrained from their rightful lands. Layers of personal, collective, and historical pain radiate from these paintings. Their lush purple-magenta palettes evoke both juicy fruits and bruises.
