Kudditji Kngwarreye | 'My Country, 2016' | 200x300cm

Code: PPFA2021161

Artist: Kudditji Kngwarreye

Title: My Country

Area: Utopia, NT

Community: Anmatyerre / Alyawerre

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 200x300cm

Year: 2016

A single window of red burns at the centre of a wall of white and grey. Kudditji Kngwarreye built these compositions from memory and country, not from any schooling in modern painting. The parallels with Rothko came later, from critics. He was simply painting what he saw and knew.

The palette here reads as a hot day inside a cool one. The reds carry the pigment of desert earth after rain, the ochre glow of late sun on rock. Around them, thick strokes of white and silver drop down in rough horizontal bands. The paint sits heavy on the surface. You can see the pull of the brush, the ridges where one pass met the next.

Kudditji called these works My Country, and he meant it plainly. This is the land east of Alice Springs where he grew up, worked as a stockman, and returned to paint in his later years. The bands suggest ridgelines, salt pans, the layered flats of Sandhill Country seen from above or from a distance. The red square holds the heart of that place, a fire, a waterhole, a spirit site remembered.

He was the younger brother of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and he came to painting through her example. His voice, though, is entirely his own. Where Emily's canvases teem with mark and movement, Kudditji strips everything back. He gives you weight, temperature, and quiet. A late work by one of the most singular colourists to come out of Utopia, and a painting that rewards standing close and then stepping back.