About the artist
Kudditji Kngwarreye was a senior Anmatyerre elder from Alhalkere, on the Utopia homelands about 250 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. He belonged to the Eastern Anmatyerre language group and was the younger brother, through kinship, of the celebrated artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Before he came to painting he lived a traditional bush life and worked as a cattle stockman and mine worker across Central Australia.
As a custodian of many important Dreamings, Kudditji held ceremonial law for sites across his country, particularly around Boundary Bore, where men's initiation ceremonies are performed. His paintings carry the authority of that knowledge, and he was known to sing his stories quietly as he worked, infusing each canvas with the ancestors, the hunts and the seasons of Anmatyerre country.
Kudditji began painting in the mid-1980s in the fine dot style that galleries favoured at the time. His instinct, though, was for something looser and more gestural, and he gradually moved toward broad fields of colour he called My Country. The shift was not embraced at first, and for a period he was encouraged back toward conventional dot infill. From the early 2000s he returned with conviction to the abstract, loading his brush and laying down bold and softly blended blocks of colour to map the land and sky through their changing moods and seasons. This time the art world welcomed it.
Critics have often likened these luminous colour fields to the work of Mark Rothko, and Kudditji became affectionately known as the "Rothko of the bush". The voice, however, is unmistakably his own, grounded in country rather than any Western school. He is now regarded as one of the most innovative contemporary Indigenous Australian artists of his generation.
Selected exhibitions
2009 — Rêves Aborigènes, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Bormes-les-Mimosas, France
2006 — Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark
2006 — Togart Contemporary Art Award, Darwin
1992 — Tjukurrpa, Museum für Völkerkunde, Basel, Switzerland
1991 — Central Australian Aboriginal Art and Craft Exhibition, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
1990 — Contemporary Art from Australia, Art Dock, Nouméa, New Caledonia
Recognition and awards
In 2006 Art Collector magazine named Kudditji one of Australia's 50 Most Collectable Artists. Gallery records also credit him with a First Prize at the Cape York Art Awards in 2001 for the painting "Sorrow", and a First Prize for works on paper in 1999 for the etching "Spirits Dance".
Collections
His work is held in public, university and private collections in Australia and overseas, including the Araluen Art Centre (Alice Springs), Macquarie University (New South Wales) and Artbank (the Australian Government art collection, Sydney), together with international private collections such as the Luciano Benetton Collection (Venice) and the Fondation Burkhardt-Felder Arts et Culture (Switzerland).
This painting was purchased directly from Kudditji, and a gallery certificate of authenticity will be provided with the sale.
