Title

Ginger Riley: The Boss of Colour.

Venues

Castlemaine Art Gallery And Historical Museum (15 January 2015 – 19 April 2015)

Date

(2015)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (VIC). Paintings.

Documentation

Catalogue

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

Castlemaine Art Gallery is proud and privileged to present the exhibition, Ginger Riley: The Boss of Colour. This will be the first major exhibition of Ginger Riley Munduwalawala’s work since the retrospective Mother Country in Mind: The Art of Ginger Riley Munduwalawala held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997, and the first survey exhibition in a public gallery since the artist passed away in 2002. It is also the first exhibition of Indigenous art at the Castlemaine Art Gallery. Riley (circa 1936- 2002) was a saltwater man, from Marra country in the gulf region of the Northern Territory. He is recognised for his strikingly bright and bold paintings of his Mother country. The exhibition presents Riley’s vibrant and powerful depictions of country which challenged and changed Australia’s preconceived notion of Indigenous art, and our landscape painting tradition. The intensity and energy of Riley’s paintings is so strong that Australian expressionist David Larwill dubbed him, “the boss of colour”. In the catalogue essay, Director Jennifer Kalionis writes, ‘The Boss of Colour reflects an institutional change in our regional art gallery which acknowledges the exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art as integral to a more reflective understanding and interrogation of Australian art, particularly the landscape tradition’. [Gallery publicity].