Fish Coming Down the River, 1994

synthetic polymer paint on paper

56 x 76 cm; 83.5 x 103 cm (framed)

Est. $3,000 – $5,000

Hammer $2,200

Provenance: Private Collection, NSW
Artwork story: Abdulla wrote it in the sky, in his own hand, at the top of the canvas: "Then we looked again and we saw all these fish coming by the hundreds down the river. It was all these thukeri's or bony bream coming down to die off." The text sits above a deep blue river flanked by river red gums. Two small figures watch from the bank above while others play at the water's edge below, the bony bream moving through the river among them in their hundreds. It is a childhood memory from the Riverland, recorded with the directness of lived experience. Abdulla grew up at Cobdolga beside the Murray River and came to painting through a community screen-printing workshop in Glossop in 1988. His first solo exhibition followed in 1991 at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute in Adelaide, where, as Hetti Perkins wrote in Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia (AGNSW, 2014), his work came to national attention. He was named South Australian Aboriginal Artist of the Year that same year and received an Australia Council Fellowship in 1992. "I can only paint what I know to be true," he told Adrian Newstead OAM, and it is that quality — the refusal of anything not directly experienced — that gives a painting like this one its weight. The mass death of bony bream in the Murray was not metaphor. It was something he saw.

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Sale 3 · Lot 106

1947 – 2011

synthetic polymer paint on paper

56 x 76 cm; 83.5 x 103 cm (framed)

Est. $3,000 – $5,000

Hammer $2,200

Provenance: Private Collection, NSW
Artwork story: Abdulla wrote it in the sky, in his own hand, at the top of the canvas: "Then we looked again and we saw all these fish coming by the hundreds down the river. It was all these thukeri's or bony bream coming down to die off." The text sits above a deep blue river flanked by river red gums. Two small figures watch from the bank above while others play at the water's edge below, the bony bream moving through the river among them in their hundreds. It is a childhood memory from the Riverland, recorded with the directness of lived experience. Abdulla grew up at Cobdolga beside the Murray River and came to painting through a community screen-printing workshop in Glossop in 1988. His first solo exhibition followed in 1991 at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute in Adelaide, where, as Hetti Perkins wrote in Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia (AGNSW, 2014), his work came to national attention. He was named South Australian Aboriginal Artist of the Year that same year and received an Australia Council Fellowship in 1992. "I can only paint what I know to be true," he told Adrian Newstead OAM, and it is that quality — the refusal of anything not directly experienced — that gives a painting like this one its weight. The mass death of bony bream in the Murray was not metaphor. It was something he saw.