Patrick Butcher: On Common Ground: Click on the photo above for a sneak peek at the work you'll see at Puuya Kuntha — Strong Heart: New Works by Aboriginal Artists from Australia’s Lockhart River Art Gang

Because Booker-Lowe Gallery is one of just a few spaces devoted to Australian aboriginal art in the United States, Houstonians have more chances than most other Americans to appreciate what critic Robert Hughes has called “the last great art movement of the 20th century.”

But even those who think they know aboriginal painting may do a double-take at what artists from the ultra-remote Lockhart River Arts Centre in northeastern Queensland are up to. Known collectively as the Lockhart River Art Gang, some of the group’s members have achieved international renown while living and working in virtual isolation.

Some of their latest offerings are on view through Jan. 23 in Puuya Kuntha — Strong Heart: New Works by Aboriginal Artists from Australia’s Lockhart River Art Gang.

While the paintings’ abstract, often gestural imagery appears reminiscent of the styles that emerged in New York after World War II, they express aboriginal “dreamings,” or myths, that help preserve the oral culture’s ancient traditions and survival lore.

Superficially, Patrick Butcher’s splashy abstractions seem to combine Jackson Pollock’s drip technique with a saturated color palette, but Butcher’s work is about his ancestral country’s weather patterns — particularly wind, which he says he wants viewers to be able to feel when looking at his paintings.

Some of the exhibit’s featured artists are relatives of already-successful Lockhart Gang members who talked them into giving painting a try. They quickly developed their own distinctive styles.

You’d be unlikely to confuse the work of Rosella Namok — one of the group’s most famous young members who has had solo shows throughout Australia and in London and Paris — with that of her mother, Irene Namok, a relative latecomer to painting.

Irregular bands of white paint float in a salmon-pinkish field in Rosella Namok’s Clan Group, Different Tribes, while her mother’s All together Quintell Beach is among the show’s most representational works. Its floral and tree forms and watery areas populate a quilt-like landscape.

Such comparisons underscore the impression that while the group’s members are far removed from outside influences, so far they’ve managed to forge individual ways of seeing.

Booker-Lowe recently was named the first gallery outside of Australia to be accepted as a member of Indigenous Art Code Ltd. and a signatory to the Indigenous Australian Art Commercial Code of Conduct. The code aims to establish standards for commercial dealing with indigenous artists and assure collectors that the artworks they buy come through ethical processes.