GINGER RILEY MUNDUWALAWALA, Untitled (Warru), c.1991

GINGER RILEY MUNDUWALAWALA Marra language, c.1936 - 2002 Untitled (Warru), c.1991 acrylic on canvas board 34 x 42.5 cm; 57 x 63.5 cm (framed) signed middle front: 'GINGER RILEY' PROVENANCE Painted in the Ngukurr region, South East Arnhem Land Sotheby's, Contemporary and Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, Victoria, 18 June 1995, Lot 27 Private Collection, New South Wales Ginger Riley Munduwalawala's paintings are grounded in his mother's Country around the Limmen Bight River in south-east Arnhem Land, where a network of ancestral events defines the landscape. Central to this Country is the area of the Four Archers and the ancestral serpent Warru, whose journey through the landscape is fundamental to Riley's imagery. Warru travelled through Country during the ancestral period, moving across and beneath the earth and shaping the landscape as he went. At a time when the land was dry, the serpent journeyed in search of water, eventually travelling underground and breaking through the earth to release the waters held below. The river flowed again across the Country, bringing life back to the land, its plants and animals. Warru's presence remains within these waterways and the landscape formed through his ancestral journey. This story became one of the defining subjects of Riley's practice. Warru appears repeatedly in his paintings, winding through compositions alongside the Limmen Bight River, hills, trees and other significant features of his mother's Country. Riley did not treat these ancestral events as something belonging solely to the past; they remain embedded within and continually present in Country. Through brilliant colour, flattened perspective and boldly delineated forms, Riley developed an immediately recognisable visual language through which the ancestral geography of his Country could be brought into view. His paintings hold together landscape, story and ancestral presence, with Warru providing an enduring connection between the visible Country and the forces that shaped it. © GINGER RILEY MUNDUWALAWALA / Copyright Agency, 2026

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