Spinifex Tjukurpa

The ReDot Fine Art Gallery is very proud to welcome the first ever exhibition in Singapore for the Spinifex Arts Project. Hailing from Tjuntjuntjara this incredibly remote community from the southern part of the Great Victoria Desert, where today some of the most significant Indigenous oeuvres are being produced, will be exhibited in to coincide and celebrate the 10th anniversary of the ReDot Fine Art Gallery’s opening its doors in the Lion City.

The Spinifex Arts Project was established in 1997 as part of the ‘Native Title’ documentation process. Both native title paintings, a men’s and women’s collaborative work, documented the entire Spinifex area showing claimants birthplaces and important stories that traversed and gave form to the area.

These paintings were formally included in the preamble to the ‘Native Title’ agreement which was ratified before the Federal Court in November 2000. To celebrating the success of the land claim process the Spinifex People bequeathed ten major paintings to the People of WA to be housed at the Western Australian Museum and so as they say an art centre was born.

Spinifex Tjukurpa will showcase over 30 outstanding recent works, including major collaborative’s by both the men and women of the project; retaining many of the core values and elements of the early land claim works whilst challenging the viewer to question previously held notions of Indigenous art and its position within today’s fast and modern contemporary art world. Typically large meandering canvases tell of complex, yet fundamental, stories of ownership and land rights fused with whimsical stories of creation handed from generation to generation.

The Spinifex artists continue to paint traditional stories and document kinship responsibilities and these works have become widely known in the fine art world as some of the most important modern contemporary Indigenous art pieces being produced today. This growing reputation is also gaining international acclaim and the works are now housed within major art and museum collections both in Australia and overseas, with recent acquisitions by the British Museum making headlines and a major show in Germany in 2013.

This exhibition showcasing works by old master such as Fred Grant, Ned Grant, Roy Underwood, Estelle Hogan, Tjaruwa Woods and Lawrence Pennington, to mention but a few, opens on Wednesday, 14th May and runs till Saturday, 21st June 2014 and it is a must-see for anyone interested in following the development of modern contemporary Indigenous art, from one of the Aboriginal art movements most remote, refreshing and innovative art centres.