Timeline

Like his famous older sister, the late great Emily Kngwarreye, Kudditji Kngwarreye (pronounced goo-beh-chee) has a deserved reputation as an innovator yet at the same time being a well respected artist.

Born around 1928, Kudditji Kngwarreye had a traditional bush upbringing in the Utopia region before starting a long career as a stockman and mine worker. As an Anmatyerre elder and custodian of many important Dreamings, Kudditji was originally inspired by the work coming out of Papunya to paint his own Dreamings, telling of the travels and law of the Emu ancestors. Starting in 1986, his Emu Dreaming paintings, which reflected his traditional upbringing and utilised the very fine dots and symbols, became sought after by major galleries in Australia.

Then, intrigued by the possibilities of acrylic paint and the kaleidoscope of colours now available to him, Kudditji began to experiment with the synthetic polymer paint to eradicate the pointillist style altogether and to use a heavily loaded paint brush to sweep broadly across the canvas in stages, similar to the western landscape plane. These paintings were romantic images of his country, accentuating the colour and form of the landscape including the depth of the sky in the wet season and in the reds and oranges of the shimmering summer heat.

These ground-breaking paintings expressed Kudditji’s extensive knowledge and love of his country in a way never seen previously. Some commentators have seen a strong similarity with his sister Emily's work - but it is not clear who was the first to set out on this path. The demand for his earlier, detailed style, however, moved Kudditji to return to it, and it was only in 2003 at the age of 74 that he began to exhibit the extraordinary, saturated colour paintings that have seen his reputation grow nationally and internationally. His two dimensional spatial constructions innocently refer to Rothko and modernists of the twentieth century. The paintings are documents of an intuitive interplay between artist and creating a spacial tension within the canvas. Kudditji has explored size of canvas as well as form in these intense, beautiful works. A sense of immense space can be felt in the paintings, where massive blocks of stippled colour are laid alongside each other, sometimes using only two colours, while in other paintings a quilt of juxtaposed colours can produce a moody atmospheric landscape effect.