Kudditji Kngwarreye is an internationally recognised Papunya Tula artist. He is the younger brother of one of the most famous Utopian artists, Emily Kame Kngwarreye. He is from the Utopia region, born at Alhalkere, which is about 230 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs. Before he began painting in the 1980s, he worked a variety of desert jobs, including as a stockman and as a miner of gold and minerals. Today he is an elder and custodian of many important Dreamings.
The Papunya Tula art community inspired him to paint his own Dreamings. Many of his paintings refer to sites at Boundary Bore, where men's initiation ceremonies are performed. From 1986, his precisely dotted 'Emu Dreaming' paintings became popular in major galleries in the Northern Territory.
Later in the mid 1990s Kudditji took a radical path with his painting style, moving away from the common dot style. In 2003 he began to exhibit paintings of a different style sometimes compared with that of colour-field artists.
Kudditji knows this country well. He has travelled across it on foot. His works capture the very essence of his traditional country – varying from patchwork of brilliant irregular squares representing various tracts of land to sweeping horizons that reflect the wide flat horizons of the weathered desert landscape.
Kudditji Kngwarreye's works, powerful, bold and striking represent the final stage in Kudditji’s evolution as an artist. Like his famous older sister the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kudditji is a custodian of this country. Although both Emily and her brother developed a more abstract style in the later years, they both remained faithful to their designated Dreaming stories.
Although a frail man now approaching his eightieth year, Kudditji continues to paint his country in a passionate and compelling way the colours of his country.
Kudditjis dreamings refer to the travels and the law of the Emu ancestors. In the aboriginal mythology (dreamtime) the Emu was one of three sisters that flied to the earth at the beginning of the dreamtime. Two of them left the earth, but the Emu, who couldn’t fly, stayed back.
On that account Emu created the so called Tnatanja Pol, a star, on which human seeds grow. If the wind blows the seeds to the right it becomes a man and to the left a woman. Emu mutates to Earth Mother. This is how dreamtime explains incarnation and the part of the Emu.
He has been represented in major international exhibitions and has gained worldwide recognition for his traditional depictions of his Dreamings. Both public and private collectors worldwide acquire his highly collectible work.
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Selected Solo Exhibitions
1991 Central Australian Aboriginal Art and Craft Exhibition, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
1992 “Tjukurrpa”, Museum fur Volkerkunde, Basel, Switzerland
1999 Chapel off Chapel Gallery, Melbourne
2000 Mia Mia Aboriginal Gallery, Melbourne
2003 Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne
2004 Japingka Gallery, Perth; Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne; Two Senior Men, Art Mob Gallery, Tasmania; Australian Exhibition Centre, Chicago; Spirit of Colour depot Gallery, Sydney, Waterhole Aboriginal Art, Sofitel Wentworth, Sydney
2005 Art Mob, Hobart, Tasmania; Big Country Gallery, Gondwana, Alice Springs; Canberra Grammar School, Canberra; Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne; Waterhole Aboriginal Art, Danks Street, Sydney
2006 Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne; Japingka Gallery, Perth
AUSTRALIA DREAMINGS 2008 / ab 14. Dezember 2008
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