Dhambit Munuŋgurr
In her debut solo exhibition in Europe, Dhambit Munuŋgurr continues to paint vibrant Yolŋu life in a spectrum of blues.
Image credit: Dhambit Ruypu Munuŋgurr, Our Life Mä a & Octopus, 2024, acrylic paint on paper, 122.5 × 80.5 cm, Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and Buku-Larr ggay Mulka Centre © the artist
An acrylic painting on paper depicts a pair of Bäru (saltwater crocodiles) lovingly tending to a clutch of eggs. Set against a field of striking blue, streams of cross-hatched diamond forms move vertically across the frame beside the animals. For the Dhuwal language groups of the Yolŋu people, Garraŋali names the nest of the saltwater crocodile both in the landscape and cosmologically. In the centre of the painted reptiles’ nest, the six pale eggs represent members of the artist’s family. Within this painting of two crocodiles, stories of place, family, mythology and biology co-mingle in colours as striking as they are deceptively unconventional. The painting is part of a new body of work in the exhibition The Earth is Blue: The Art of Dhambit Munuŋgurr, showing in the galleries of the Australian Embassy in Paris. The show marks the titular artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe.
Dhambit Munuŋgurr was raised in Yirrkala, a community in northeast Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory. Today, she resides on the island of Gunyangara in the Arafura Sea, regularly making the short sea crossing to paint at Yirrkala’s Buku-Larrŋggay Mulka Centre, an arts centre operated by and for the region’s Indigenous communities. With a practice developed over 40 years, the Yolŋu artist is one of Australia’s most celebrated, daring and innovative contemporary painters. Munuŋgurr paints familial stories with, as, beside and as-inseparable-from ancestral stories, lands, waters and the thrumming biological life of Yolŋu Country. Cheekily contravening the romanticising... Subscribe to read all articles in full
