Kathleen Ngale (* ca. 1930) belongs to the oldest generation of artists from “Utopia”, an Aboriginal homeland in the Northern Territory of Australia. To this day, the region remains as removed as possible from Western influences, which is reflected in the biography of Kathleen Ngale, who only came into contact with acrylic paints in the 1980s.

Previously she had experimented with the Indonesian batik technique, which is a kind of wax painting on textiles. In the artistic expression of the Aborigines of Utopia, one formal feature stands out in particular: the striking use of dots. Although the cumulative arrangement of the multi-layered colour dots does not follow a strictly pictorial function, the compositions, with their almost ...