Exhibitions

The ReDot Fine Art Gallery is proud to be participating in the 2014 Affordable Art Fair, being held at the F1 Pit Building.

We will be at Level 2, Paddock 2, Booth 2B-09, The Burgundy Room. 

We look forward to welcoming you to our booth and all the exciting new works we have picked for this very special event.

The fair opens officially to the public on Thursday 20th November and runs till Sunday 23rd November 2014.

"Like us" on Facebook to be kept up to date with all our artists and news on AFF 2014.

If you require further information please contact Giorgio on +65 8113 5333. Email: info@redotgallery.com or check our website: www.redotgallery.com

ReDot Fine Art Gallery in collaboration with Elisabeth Hutchinson proudly invites you to a solo exhibition of exceptional works by Indian artist, Rajnish Kaur.

Born in Delhi 1967, Rajnish Kaur is one of the new generation of India’s finest contemporary artists. She received her BA and MA at Delhi College of Art and was awarded the Charles Wallace Scholarship to London’s Chelsea College of Art (Postgraduate).

After lecturing at Delhi College of Art (1994-1997) she decided to concentrate solely on her work. Her art has been exhibited internationally with 30 shows in India, London, New York, Switzerland and 8 solo shows in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Singapore.

Her work is dually inspired by the colour palette and decorative imagery of 18th century Indian miniature painting (which she studied) and the vitality her immediate environment. The hustle and bustle of the vibrant market feet from her front door with its dogs and cows moving here and there, rickshaws competing for space with luxury cars, fruit and vegetable stalls and wedding shops selling garlands and beads. She brings these elements to life in her abstract works, which burst with colour and intriguing detail.

Her work is an evocation of experience and has an undeniably powerful draw. Brimming with feelings, memories and desires it is homage to the exuberance of life and intensity of existence. Within the textured and generously applied layers you may recognise a moment of life: a perfect summer’s day, the embers of a dream, the smell of rain, the bustle of urban life or the wonder of childhood. The result is stunning art bursting with colour which is quite simply, beautiful.

We are very proud to present this major exhibition of over 50 pieces of her latest works.

ReDot Fine Art Gallery proudly invites you to an exhibition of exceptional works from Australia’s foremost Aboriginal owned art centre, Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd. This exhibition represents the 11th annual showing in Singapore of the stunning work by these gifted artists from Australia’s Western Desert. This year we will be hosting dual solo shows, simply titled after the participating artists, Bobby West Tjupurrula & Katarra Butler Napaltjarri. Bobby West Tjupurrula is the son of Freddy West Tjakamarra, one of the founding shareholders of Papunya Tula Artists, and comes from an impressive family of established Papunya Tula painters. Born at the rockhole site of Tjamu Tjamu, east of Kiwirrkura, around 1958, Bobby’s family was met by Jeremy Long’s welfare patrol in 1963. He commenced painting for Papunya Tula Artists in the late 1980s, but it wasn’t really until 1993 that he began painting regularly. Since then he has become an integral part of the company not just as an artist but also as the company Chairman on several occasions. Bobby is a strong advocate and voice of the Western Desert Dialysis unit, an organisation close to his heart given he too suffers renal failure and receives regular dialysis.

Katarra Butler Napaltjarri in contrast has only recently burst onto the Papunya Tula artistic map, though records show she first painted for the company in 2001. Born near the current location of the Tjukurla Community in Western Australia in circa 1946, she was the second wife of Anatjari Tjakamarra, another pre-eminent member of the original group of painters who started the Central Desert painting movement in Papunya in 1971 and learnt her trade from him most probably and Ningura Napurulla, whose mentoring is evident in her early works but not so much in the abandonment of colour and brush work in her recent acclaimed work. Whilst she has extended family ties with the Tjukurla area, Katarra also spends considerable time in Kintore and Kiwirrkura where she accesses the Papunya Tula Artists studio.

Whilst their respective styles could not be more opposing, Bobby’s traditionally inspired and firmly encamped in the style of his fore-fathers and Katarra’s more modern, whimsical and abstract, they very much represent the Papunya Tula art movement of today. This will be Katarra’s first solo exhibition, and comes just months after being nominated as a finalist in this year’s NATSIAA awards meanwhile this will be the 2nd solo show for Bobby, who has earned enormous appeal in the NATSIAA over the many years he has painstakingly produced complex, important, works for the company.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday, 29th October and runs till Saturday, 29th November 2014 and it is a must-see for anyone interested in following the recent developments of Papunya Tula Artists, one of the Aboriginal art movements most important art centres. The show will be attended by Mr. Paul Sweeney, General Manager of Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd.

The ReDot Fine Art Gallery is delighted to announce the addition of a new artist to its stable with the showing of a series of new works by Joshua Bonson, one of the Northern Territories most exciting young emerging talents of recent years.

Skins by Joshua Bonson will be Joshua’s first overseas solo show, following hot off the first solo and sell-out show in Australia in 2013 and will showcase over 25 recent works by this Darwin born and bred Indigenous man whom captured the attention of the Australian Art Scene by storm, becoming the youngest ever finalist in the 24th Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award (2007) at the tender age of only 18, one of Australia’s most prestigious art prizes. To show this was no flash in the pan this was followed up in 2008 by being again selected for the 25th Telstra Award.

Accolades have followed him ever since and at the age of 22, he won the Togart Contemporary Art Award, the youngest ever winner. In 2013 Joshua made it a hat-trick of Telstra nominations, a finalist in the City of Albany Art Prize and winner of the Top End NAIDOC artist of the year prize 2014.

Born in 1988, this now 25 year old has already achieved more in his career than many do in a lifetime, his work has already been collected by major institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), the Kerry Stokes Collection, the Wheelock Properties Collection, the Toga Contemporary Art Collection and Art Bank Collection to name but a few.

 Bonson is a painter who works in a highly textured, but largely monochromatic style, which is a form of abstract expressionism. Bonson recreates the scales of a saltwater crocodile, which is his totem. The armoured skin of the reptile is shown by the built up serrations of paint, his works read as a close-up of a reptile’s skin, and as a landscape both seen from a distance and close-up details of rocks and sand.

“Skin is a celebration of my family’s totem, The Saltwater Crocodile and my personal view of the world. Even though I live in the Northern Territory, part of my heritage comes from the Torres Strait and creating this work is my way of trying to represent my skins affiliations and my place there.”

Joshua and his peers are important – they express a perspective on a particular reality that can help us better understand the social condition of young Indigenous people at this point in time and this will be critical as modern Indigenous people find their place in modern Australian life.

This exhibition, which will be attended by Joshua, opens on Wednesday, 17th September and runs till Saturday, 25th October 2014 and it is a must-see for anyone interested in following the development of modern contemporary Indigenous art, from one of the countries youngest and most talented urban artists.

Following on from last year’s release of works from the estate of Paji Wajina Honeychild Yankarr, ReDot Fine Art Gallery is honoured and excited to be able to announce the estates and final works of three other senior women from the same community, the highly esteemed Wakartu Cory Surprise, Nyuju Stumpy Brown and Walka Molly Rogers.

Simply titled ‘Cory/Molly/Stumpy’, this exhibition will celebrate their amazing talents with works both on canvas and paper, dating back over 20 years, blatant records of desert country with the recurring theme being the Jila (waterhole) of various sites in the Great Sandy Desert which is one of the major ancestral areas for their people.

All three women were founding members of Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency in the early nineties and first exhibited work in the exhibition ‘Karrayili’ in Tandanya, Adelaide, 1991. They were also represented in Images of Power: Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley, National Gallery of Victoria, 1993. They instantly gained national recognition and became part of the core group of artists at the art centre who continued to paint and exhibit consistently throughout the 1990s and 2000s with their domestic appeal soon moving internationally. Cory and Stumpy eventually became two of the best known Indigenous artists in Australia and Molly creating a solid fan base for her whimsical portraits of Kimberley waterholes.

They also jointly worked on the two eminent Ngurrara canvases in 1997, which were pivotal in proving the group’s connection to country and later led to their successful Ngurrara Native Title Claim.

Nyuju’s effervescent, intuitive and brightly hued paintings reflect a spritely and engaging character that belies the hardships and cultural dislocation that she experienced in her long life. Wakartu on the other hand came to painting relatively late in life, at around the age of 50, after many years of rigorous station work. There’s nothing overly typical though about Wakartu’s paintings. In a community and art centre acclaimed for both its large-scale collaborations and major individual talents, Wakartu wielded a powerful blend of no-nonsense seniority and sheer, expressive originality. Walka blended effortlessly between the pair, contrasting, complimenting and threading together the complex stories these women had to tell.

Wakartu’s bold compositions, restricted palette and sheer expressive originality had her admirers proclaiming her among Australia’s foremost abstract painters, Nyuju and Walka sat very close by on this scale.

A never to be repeated show, there are over 50 works, from major canvases to exquisite small works on paper, capturing one of the most important bodies of Indigenous work to have left Australia in many years.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday, 13th August and runs till Saturday, 13th September 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 refreshing and innovative art centres.

I have always been inextricably connected to the archetypal natural environments of my various Australian homes, but it is an almost entirely antithetic source that inspires this body of work.

During a period of years living, working and travelling in South-East Asia there developed a potent relationship with the people and history of Cambodia. The inevitable process of finding voice for this story through my art practice was given impetus through a BHPBilliton commission in 2006 to produce a major work for their head office in Phnom Penh. Drawing on previous travels throughout the region, and a return to Cambodia specifically for the project, several key elements emerged.

The quintessential Bayon smiles of Angkor, in all their splendour, seemed too ubiquitous a face of Cambodia to convey a personal, human story. On being first confronted with the relatively unremarkable stone facades of Tuol Sleng, I saw a contemporary history of Cambodia that was profoundly moving, and after all, not entirely dissimilar to that of Angkor. As the magnificent aerial roots consume the temple of Ta Prohm, so the elements reclaim what another generation sought to achieve at Tuol Sleng.

The former Khmer Rouge prison stands as a memorial to the indescribably tragic events that took place on this site, and throughout Cambodia, in the late 1970’s. Visitors that walk the corridors tread lightly amidst the resounding silence. After thirty years, the walls are crumbling. Flaking layers of plaster and paint give way to encroaching damp and oppressive heat. Surfaces seep with the beauty and inexorable touch of natural elements, fading the stencilled numerals and text, healing the symbolic scars of human brutality. In the haunting black and white photographs, names are replaced with numbers. On the walls that bore witness, the numbers grow faint and the voices fall silent.

Many of the cells in the former secondary school are scarred with inscriptions left by the Khmer Rouge guards. Stencilled numerals adorn several walls, separated by roughly daubed lines. In addition to these de-humanising symbols of restraint and mass control, Khmer text is scrawled in broken words and phrases. The rules by which prisoners were forced to live their short and tortured existence within the prison were also written around the walls, the beautiful flow of the foreign script belying the terror of its meaning.

Contrasting with these numeric and written symbols left by those who passed through S-21, is the canvas on which they hang. The texture and colour of nature’s reclaiming force has turned the walls into subtly beautiful backdrops, touched with moss and the soft brush of decay. There exists a strong sense of nature prevailing as the edifice of human tragedy crumbles. The paintings of this series attempt to capture something of this contrast between the tragic events of the Khmer Rouge rule and the inevitable regeneration of nature.

There also emerged a more personal connection with this place. Amongst the photographs taken of prisoners from the time when they were processed as new arrivals, there loomed a particular image that took my attention amidst a numbing litany of haunting faces. A young boy I would only ever know as 55.

A gaze of simultaneous subjugation and defiance is caught in a fleeting moment, with another boy partially obscured beside him swathed in a blindfold. During the time I paused in this former class-room, my thoughts took me back to when I was his age. I was at high school, walking corridors past rows of rooms and looking over quadrangles that could have been the same as those where I stood. The remembered stairwells at the end of each block echoed with the voices of friends and laughter and feet in well-heeled shoes. Here they were silent. The eyes of prisoner 55 held me firm and invoked a resolve to be remembered. He could have become a husband, a father, a man my own age walking the streets of Phnom Penh that surrounded that place, but he was to remain a perpetual teenager called 55. From this victim of a systematic process that stripped away identity and dignity to replace them with numbers and humility, there remained a voice through this photograph.

The telling of any story is imbued with the nuance and interpretation of the story-teller, so it was inevitable that a response to my experiences of Tuol Sleng would be coloured with those qualities that speak most poignantly to my particular aesthetic and emotions. The starkness and symbolism of the photographs, text and numbers didn’t tell everything I felt was important to say about this phenomenon. There was also a subtlety of texture and sense of gradual healing which I only began to perceive after several visits and a closer focus on what could be seen beyond the visible. The first time was, indeed, black and white and assaulting to the senses. But there were other layers. This work is an attempt to speak of those layers in a way which is both literal in its use of graphic symbols and intangible in its representation of the metaphysical. The paintings are the outcome of seeking to distil a complex experience, not in search of any particular answer or even the posing of any particular question, but rather as an acknowledgement. An acknowledgement of all that transpired during this dark time and all those that passed through the corridors of S-21. An acknowledgement of Tuol Sleng as a place and of 55 as a person.

The ReDot Fine Art Gallery is excited to hold a mid-year Stockroom Show, coinciding with this year’s football World Cup, bringing bored partners of football mad men and women a little from each of our art centre relationships, be it a small gem from the desert or a majestic masterpiece from one of our Top End centres. We’ve spent some time rummaging around in our vast storeroom just for you and we will also be showcasing a new exciting star of the Warlukurlangu Art Centre, Murdie Nampijinpa Morris during this period.

So, while England chase Italy around in the heat of the tropical rainforests and Brazil do the football mamba in the Maracanã, why don’t you indulge and buy yourself something to remember the 2014 World Cup forever…?

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.

The ReDot Fine Art Gallery is very proud to announce the first ever overseas solo exhibition for the exciting new talent of Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, Sonia Kurarra, with a simple named show called Martuwarra (River Country).

Sonia is a Walmajarri woman who paints the sandy billabong country on a small stretch of the Fitzroy River directly behind Yungngora community. She relates in her paintings to her birth country, Martuwarra (River Country) rather than her ancestral home of the Great Sandy Desert.

Her artworks are created organically and without preconceived conceptions, and it is through her artworks that she shares the eco systems of the Fitzroy River and her connection to this land. Her first stroke creates the work, both in composition and subject. Early motifs and fishes are large and bold, though as the canvas dissipates, smaller and smaller elongated fish are squeezed into the confines of the picture plane.

Her motifs are repeated over and over again and it is through this process that she often loses sight of her reference points, requiring prompting as to the subject matter or in her frustrations painting something entirely different to the previous layer. Through her continuous layering, repetition and overlapping of colours and motifs the imagery blurs. This abstraction of the figurative form often creates unattainable subject matter for both the viewer and the artist. Kurarra paints intuitively and with a sense of immediacy, creating energetic and rhythmic images which share both her connection to country and the strength of her character. She paints seated and with the canvas strewn out horizontally before her, concentrating only on the subject at hand letting the composition unfold unrestricted. It is only when the middle cannot be reached does she request a vertical position, revealing the work in its entirety for the first time, often met with a nod of approval or thumbs up.

To watch her paint is mesmerising, the broad sweep of her brush scribes her country with exact confidence, layer upon layer. The exuberance of her character, falling in and out of meditative state, as she reflects back on her birthplace and country whilst meticulously covering the canvas and occasionally breaking into song is heart-warming. Etched in her psyche Kurarra’s practice is a requirement within herself, a scripture denoting her connection to country, which she embraces without hesitation through her artistic practices.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday, 9th April and runs till Saturday, 10th May 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 refreshing and innovative art centres.