Bark painting is an Australian Aboriginal art form, involving painting on the interior of a strip of tree bark. While examples of painted bark shelters were found in the south-eastern states (then colonies) of Tasmania, Victoria, and New South Wales in the 19th century, as well as later on bark shelters in northern Australia, it is now typically only found as a continuing form of artistic expression in Arnhem Land and other regions in the Top End of Australia, including parts of the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

Bark paintings were traditionally produced (especially among the Yolngu peoples) for instructional and ceremonial purposes and were transient objects. Today, they are keenly sought after by collectors and public arts institutions.

Painting on the dried bark stripped off trees, using ochres, is an old tradition. The earliest European find was in a bark shelter over a grave in Tasmania around 1800, recorded by French artist Nicolas-Martin Petit [fr], who travelled with Nicolas Baudin to Tasmania between 1800 and 1804. Other painted bark shelters were later found in Victoria and New South Wales. These were drawn with charcoal, and then painted or scratched onto bark which had been blackened by smoke. The earliest surviving bark paintings date from the 19th century, an example of which is a bark etching of a kangaroo hunt now in the British Museum, which was collected near Boort in northern Victoria by the British explorer John Hunter Kerr. Another example, painted before 1876, is held by the Museum of Victoria.

In the Kimberley and Arnhem Land, the paintings on bark shelters were similar in style to those done in rock shelters, which illustrated various stories told to young people when people were confined to the shelters for long periods during the wet season. Bark coffins and belts were painted in northeast Arnhem Land, and painted bark baskets were also used in death rituals on the Tiwi Islands.

The modern form of bark paintings began when works were commissioned from Yolngu artists. In 1912 Baldwin Spencer commissioned bark paintings at Gunbalanya (Oenpelli), and soon collectors were wanting to purchase more like these. Spencer looked for paintings on the basis of artistic and aesthetic merit, and provided examples to the Museum of Victoria. Many of these early artists' names are no longer known. Missionaries started encouraging the production of these paintings for sale, to help fund the missions, as well as to educate white Australians about Yolngu culture: from the late 1920s, Reverend Thomas Theodor Webb at Milingimbi Island, and, from 1935, Reverend W. Chaseling at Yirrkala.

From the 1930s through to the 1950s, the main collectors of bark paintings were anthropologists and missionaries, including Norman Tindale at Groote in 1922, W. Lloyd Warner, Charles P. Mountford, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, W. E. H. Stanner, and Karel Kupka.

Demand for the paintings increased during the 1960s, mostly sold through mission shops. In 1963, the Yirrkala bark petitions, which were documents written on bark, were presented to the Australian Parliament, becoming the first documentary recognition of Indigenous Australians in Australian law. The petitions asserted that the Yolngu people owned land over which the federal government had granted mining rights to a private company, Nabalco.

In 1971, the federal government established a centralised marketing company in 1971, and from 1973 the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council gave funding to communities to establish community arts centres and to employ arts advisers. From the 1970s, Maningrida, Ramingining, and Katherine developed as centres for marketing bark paintings. Today, most bark paintings are produced for the art market, although some artists still produce traditional designs.