11 May - 22 June 2023
DANIEL WALBIDI
New York
Need to get details about exhibition custom fields via API.
Coinciding with the inaugural opening of our contemporary space on 81st Street in New York, we are honoured to be entrusted with this exceptional body of work by Australia’s highly acclaimed and leading Yulparitja/Mangala artist – Daniel Walbidi.
We would like to thank Daniel and his primary representative – Emily Rohr and Short St Gallery, for entrusting us with this glorious exhibition.
Daniel Walbidi’s art practice is a visual cultural language – an esoteric dictionary of the ancient metaphysical world of desert people. His is not just story-telling or documenting the landscape; he is touching on deeper, more profound elements of desert law and culture, which dates back to the birth of humanity. For desert people, dots are used because there is no such thing as a solid. Something quantum physics has proven, we momentarily take on a form, but it is ever-changing. Cultural desert people have a deep understanding of this. They have seen massive changes in terms of the climate to the dominant political systems, yet firmly entrenched in their raison d’etre is a complex understanding of the metaphysical and the true nature of consciousness. – Emily Rohr, Short St Gallery
Contact us at enquiries@dlancontemporary.com.au to register your interest in this exhibition.
Installation Views
Daniel Walbidi
Daniel Walbidi is a highly respected Yulparija artist from Bidyadanga, Western Australia, whose innovative techniques and deep cultural knowledge have established him as one of Australia's leading contemporary landscape painters. Starting to paint at sixteen, Walbidi encouraged his elders to document desert stories and Yulparija history through art. Working from his studio in Bidyadanga, he developed a unique style using closely cropped brushes, spray cans, and detailed layering that builds the country from the ground up—each piece taking a lot of time because of complex stippling and multiple layers. Although he was educated at university, Walbidi stays true to traditional law and cultural practices, creating artworks that depict geological changes and ancestral stories of the Great Sandy Desert with remarkable skill. His achievements include winning the prestigious National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (2014) and being acknowledged among Australia's Top 50 Most Collectable Artists (2011). His artworks are part of international collections, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and feature in the documentary Desert Heart. Walbidi's legacy is in blending modern artistic methods with deep-rooted traditional knowledge, showing how Indigenous landscape painting keeps evolving while staying connected to culture and country.
There is no provenenace field for artists in AG, shoudl we add a custom field for this? Has it been scoped out sufficeiently
Need to define the interactive map functionality, we can add lat/long values as custom fields TBD.
