| The Dreamers celebrates the lives and outstanding work of eight distinguished Aboriginal artists who have contributed significantly to Australia’s cultural landscape through their creative endeavors. The exhibition is drawn exclusively from the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s collection, and includes artists from across the country, working in diverse mediums and styles. |  |
Cara Pinchbeck
The Dreamers celebrates the lives and outstanding work of eight distinguished Aboriginal artists who have contributed significantly to Australia’s cultural landscape through their creative endeavors. The exhibition is drawn exclusively from the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s collection, and includes artists from across the country, working in diverse mediums and styles. Fundamental to each of the artists included is their innovation within tradition, which has led to sustained and successful careers. Drawing on the strength of their country and culture these artists are “dreamers” who have created a new vision, revolutionizing Aboriginal art and greatly enhancing our shared cultural heritage.
The exhibition profiles major bodies of work by Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Dr. David Malangi, Munggurrawuy Yunupingu, Judy Watson, Rusty Peters, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, John Mawurndjul, and Kitty Kantilla. It draws comparisons with key works by other artists with whom they share a synergy.
Ginger Riley Munduwalawala transformed Aboriginal art and, indeed, Australian art. Drawing on his Mara heritage and the country of his southeast Arnhem Land home, he creates vibrant works forging an idiosyncratic and lasting vision of his beloved country. Adventurous and monumental, his works show an incredible facility with color. After just ten years of painting he became the first Aboriginal artist to be honored with a retrospective at an Australian public art gallery.
The works of Judy Watson have an ethereal quality, and delicately trace her matrilineal connection to country. Watson is recognized as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, having represented Australia at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997; in 2006 her works were included in the fabric of the building for the Musée du quai Branly, Paris. Her work unveils hidden histories and references aspects of the past—massacre sites, the systematic collecting of material culture and skeletal remains—and provides comment on these from her persective in the present through evocative and emotive works.
Throughout his career Ronnie Tjampitjinpa has shown constant innovation within the regimented framework of Tingari iconography. Tjampitjinpa was one of the youngest of the group of men who began painting at the start of the Western Desert art movement in 1971, and is now one of the most senior artists working for the Papunya Tula Artists company. Over his career Tjampitjinpa’s reductive painting techniques have achieved ever increasing optical effects, maintaining the structure of the Tingari icongraphy without the surplus detailing. Works such as Untitled (2001), rely strongly on the interplay between two colors creating a shimmering effect to denote spiritual power.
While Kantilla Kantilla began her career carving distinctive and usually figurative sculptures, she is best known for her delicate and detailed paintings in ocher on both paper and canvas. Her works are based on the Tiwi visual language known as jilamara (design), infinite variations of mulypinyini pwanga (lines and dots). Her delicate touch and thoughtful application of these lines and dots were often contrasted with bold areas of gestural and expressive ocher. The perfect balance of these combinations resulted in distinctive works of seemingly abstract art that established Kantilla as one of the most recognized Aboriginal artists at the turn of the millenium.
The innovative sensabilities of each of these artists distinguish their work from that of their peers and are celebrated in this exhibition.
