Not Dead Yet: Therese Ritchie and Chips Mackinolty a retrospective exhibition 

 
 
Therese Ritchie, Djiya wiba-ngka koma, eh? (You're not from here, are you?) 2000, inkjet print on German etching paper, 60 x 120cm [image], © the artist.

A landmark retrospective art exhibition for the Northern Territory will be launched at the Charles Darwin University Art Collection and Art Gallery next week.

CDU Art Collection and Art Gallery Curator Anita Angel said the exhibition entitled Not Dead Yet features a survey of 164 art works by well-known Darwin-based artists Therese Ritchie and Chips Mackinolty. 

Not Dead Yet highlights the best of a collaborative and creative partnership by two Territory-inspired, contemporary Australian artists,” she said. “Drawn from a corpus of eight earlier exhibitions, and a large body of art created over four decades, this exhibition includes many works shown in Australia for the first time.”

Arriving in the Northern Territory in the early 1980s, Ritchie and Mackinolty were pioneers of “alternative” printmaking in the region, creating powerful and persuasive graphic art of protest, propaganda and people’s politics.

“For more than three decades, working ‘together, sideways and apart’,” they captured the lives, landscapes and major events that have defined the Northern Territory both as ‘home’ and as an enduring Australian frontier,” Ms Angel said. 

“Their individual talent and combined commitment gave voice and visual form to a Territory that many would otherwise never have known.

“This exhibition will provide a rare opportunity to see a comprehensive range of screenprints, posters, drawings, photographs, digital collage works and limited edition fine art prints and paintings, dating from 1969 through to the present day.” 

Not Dead Yet revisits the Darwin studios of the Werehaus Artists’ Collective in the 1980s, Green Ant Research Arts and Publishing in the 1990s and the original “hotbed” of protest art in the 1970s – the Tin Sheds at Sydney University.

This is the artists’ first major combined exhibition at a public gallery in Australia, and the first focus survey of prints, posters and photographs in this category mounted in the Northern Territory.

The exhibition will be opened by Dr John Ah Kit at 5pm on Wednesday, 11 August 2010, Charles Darwin University Art Gallery, Chancellery, building Orange 12.1.02. 

The artists will provide two floor talks in the CDU Art Gallery: on Friday 13 August at 10am and Saturday 21 August at 11am.

Not Dead Yet will run from Thursday 12 August until Friday 17 September 2010.