Kudditji Kngwarreye: My Country - Travelling Through Utopia by Whitford Fine Art

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WHITFORD F I N E A R T 6 DUKE STREET ST. JAMES’S LONDON SW1Y 6BN TEL.+44(0)20 7930 9332 FA X . + 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 7 9 3 0 5 5 7 7 info@whitfordfineart.com w w w. w h i t f o r d f i n e a r t . c o m

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KUDDITJI KNGWARREYE

15th October – 5th November 2010

All works are for sale

WHITFORD F I N E A R T

6 DUKE STREET ST. JAMES’S LONDON SW1Y 6BN TEL. +44 (0)20 7930 9332 EMAIL info@whitfordfineart.com www.whitfordfineart.com

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KUDDITJI KNGWARREYE

Front cover: My Country , 2007 (cat. no. 17) Back cover: My Country , 2006 (cat. no. 21)

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‘MY COUNTRY’: Travelling through Utopia

Kudditji Kngwarreye is one of Aus tralia’s leading Aboriginal artis ts. He recounts his tr avels across his land in blocks of s trong colour boasting outstanding aesthetic excellence. His art tr anscends the notions of time and place, thus reflecting true Aboriginal culture. Moreover, his paintings unav oidably draw strong associations with Western abstract art. Kudditji’s knowledge of his country is as vast as the land itself, both in a physic al sense and in its his tory and how it came into being. Born ar ound 1928 at Alkahar e, Kudditji is part of the Anmaty erre language group, whose land is situated in Utopia, North East of Alice Springs. Early in life, Kudditji learned his peoples’ ‘Dreamings’ and as an Elder, he taught the younger boys the practical skills of hunting as well as knowl edge of the ceremonial sites in Utopia. Most of the four hundred-odd Aboriginal cultures in Australia share the belief that the w orld was created in the ‘Dreaming’ by ancestral spirits who left symbols all around them to guide them in their lives. If one can understand these symbols then one has a complete understanding of the world and of the meaning of life. In order to gain and retain this knowledge over the generations, the Aboriginal peoples travel their territory. In their travels, they relive their Dreamings and ancestral stories as a collective. Whereas most Aboriginal painters depict the actual ancestral symbols from what seems to be a hovering position above the ground, Kudditji chooses t o portray the essence of his land and his tr avels without perspective. His paintings capture the changing moods and seasons of the t

erritory, songs, s tories, hunts and the f ood and

waterholes of the Anmaty erre country, thus uniting the earthl y and timel ess perceptions associated with his culture. His colour-block paintings encompass an omnipresent point of view; stripped of the notions of time and place, they seem t o have no beginning and no end. This pr actice inevitably brings t o mind Jackson P ollock’s statement ‘When I am painting I hav e a general notion as to what I am about. I c an control the flow of the paint. … There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.’ Whereas Jackson Pollock relied on his intuition and his body to infuse his images with emotional f orce, Kudditji interprets the timeless collective memory of his people. Aesthetically Kudditji’s paintings have been compared to those of Mark Rothko and Hans Hofmann, whose Colour-Field paintings practically remain unknown to Kudditji. In fact, during the 1970’s when Utopia station was ceded to the Aboriginal people, Kudditji drove cattle and worked in various goldmines in the Northern T erritory. The y ounger brother of the c elebrated painter Emily Kame Knwarreye, Kudditji came to painting only in 1986. Initiall y, he assisted his sister when she de veloped her own original artistic style. Stimulated by the intr oduction of acrylic paints, Emil y painted large lyrical abstracts, contradicting previous notions of what c ontemporary Indigenous art meant. During the 1990s, Kudditji intuitiv ely set out to develop his famed sister’s dot and line abstracts into colour-block Abstraction. Kudditji’s paintings embody the v ast landscape of his c ountry, sweltering under the e xtreme elements, charged with the cultural symbols and stories of his people. He celebrates a rapidly disappearing way of Aboriginal lif e in sensational colours, thus making his art a bright t orch on the path from Utopia to the modern world. An Jo Fermon, October 2010

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