Ginger Riley: The Dreaming

Painting phenomenon Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, one of Australia's most important living Aboriginal artists, creates "bold and free works... that have a touch of madness, " says expert Judith Ryan. Winner of the National Aboriginal Art Award and the Alice Prize which involved a series of commissions for the Australian Embassy in Beijing, he went to London in the early 1990's. On seeing Picasso and van Gogh at the Tate, he decided to start signing his paintings and others followed. An abstract artist, his visual icons are, however, rooted in the ancient iconography of the mother country -- "mythic space, a mindscape with landscapes... encompassing fresh water, salt water, land and sky from different viewpoints from above and inside with paints that are mixed, layered and flung together in bizarre combinations, decorative or spare..." (National Gallery of Victoria)