19 September - 8 November 2024
GUNYBI GANAMBARR: Gapu-Buḏap – Crossing the Water | New York
Need to get details about exhibition custom fields via API.
Gunybi Ganambarr | Gapu-Buḏap – Crossing the Water is now on view in our New York gallery at 25 East 73rd Street.
The exhibition presents recent two- and three-dimensional works in bark and metal that reflect the innovative vision and skill of one of Buku-Larrŋgay Art Centre’s most important and groundbreaking artists.
Gapu-Buḏap – Crossing the Water is the first collaboration between D’Lan Contemporary, Ganambarr, and Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, and the first solo exhibition for the artist in New York.
Gunybi Ganambarr is a Yolngu artist who lives and works at Gängän, near Yirrkala in north-east ArnhemLand in the Northern Territory. After working as a builder in his twenties – during which time he acquired many of the skills he now uses in his practice – he began his artistic career painting on bark and Larrakitj (hollow logs). He has since extended his practice to experiment and innovate with reclaimed materials found on his Country, including wood, rubber, glass, steel, galvanized iron, and aluminum. Under the tutelage of artists such as Gawirrin Gumana and Yumutjin Wunungmurra from his mother’s Dhaḻwaŋu clan, Ganambarr has assumed ceremonial authority, which also informs and influences his work.
His work has been exhibited in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Art Pudong, Qatar Museums and Harvard Art Museums, and is held in many institutional collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The opening of Gapu-Buḏap– Crossing the Water coincides with the major touring exhibition, Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Bark Painting From Yirrkala, on view at the Asia Society in New York September 17, 2024 to January 5, 2025. Curated and narrated by the Yolŋu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land, the exhibition delves deep into the history of Yolŋu art practice and provides a context for the work of its leading artist, Gunybi Gunambarr.
Installation Views
Gunybi Ganambarr
Gunybi Ganambarr is a groundbreaking Yolŋu artist from the Ŋaymil clan whose innovative practice combines ceremonial authority with radical material experimentation, establishing him as one of Australia's most significant contemporary artists. Originally recognized as a ceremonial yiḏaki (didjeridu) player, Ganambarr developed his artistic practice under senior artists including Gawirrin Gumana, introducing revolutionary forms—double-sided barks, heavily sculpted poles, ironwood sculptures, and reclaimed industrial materials—while remaining entirely consistent with Yolŋu maḏayin (law). His achievements include winning the Western Australian Indigenous Art Award (2011), National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award (2018), and Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Artist Award (2008). Ganambarr's work featured prominently in major exhibitions, including APT8 at QAGOMA (2015) and The National at AGNSW (2017), where critics declared him deserving of the epithet "great." His works are held internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 2023, he completed major commissions for the National Gallery of Australia and The Met, with his solo exhibition Mali highly acclaimed. Ganambarr's legacy lies in fearlessly innovating while maintaining deep ceremonial knowledge and cultural integrity.
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.
