Untitled, 2010

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

150 x 120 cm

Est. $20,000 – $30,000

Hammer $17,000

Provenance: Yanda Aboriginal Art, Alice Springs, NT Rupert Betheras Collection, Melbourne, Vic Private Collection, Vic
Artwork story: Writing in The Australian on 1 February 2013, Nicholas Rothwell described Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa as the most forceful and overwhelming of the first western desert artists. She had spent her childhood at Pangkupirri, sheltered rockholes deep in the Gibson Desert, and did not see white men until her teens. Her first contact with the outside world, Rothwell records, came when her father led his children on a cautious journey westward until they reached the mission compound at Warburton, stared over the fence from a safe distance, then retreated to the bush. Born around 1935 in Yumara, she was the wife of John Bennett Tjapangati, one of the original artists at Papunya in the 1970s. Together they walked in from the bush to Haasts Bluff settlement and later moved to Kintore. She was instrumental in the development of the Haasts Bluff and Kintore Women's Painting Camp in 1994. It was at Yanda Art, under Chris Simons, that she hit her creative peak, pouring out large complex canvases depicting her ancestral rockholes in dark curved lines on white shimmering grounds. The result, Rothwell wrote, was a suite of paintings that now fill the great private Aboriginal art collections of the world and change hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Rothwell also wrote the introduction to the monograph The Art of Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett) by Ken McGregor and Ralph Hobbs, which reproduces this work on page 168 among a group of closely related canvases painted in 2010. Untitled 2010 is a large canvas in warm amber-gold, overlaid with flowing contour lines in near-black from which concentric oval and circular forms rise in deep burgundy, each surrounded by a halo of spiralling lines that dissolve back into the broader field. It is Country seen simultaneously from above and from within.

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Sale 3 · Lot 53

Nyurapayia (Mrs Bennett) Nampitjinpa

c.1935 – 2013

Region: Western Desert
Community: Kintore (Walungurru)
Language group: Pintupi; Pitjantjatjara

Untitled, 2010

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

150 x 120 cm

Est. $20,000 – $30,000

Hammer $17,000

Provenance: Yanda Aboriginal Art, Alice Springs, NT Rupert Betheras Collection, Melbourne, Vic Private Collection, Vic
Artwork story: Writing in The Australian on 1 February 2013, Nicholas Rothwell described Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa as the most forceful and overwhelming of the first western desert artists. She had spent her childhood at Pangkupirri, sheltered rockholes deep in the Gibson Desert, and did not see white men until her teens. Her first contact with the outside world, Rothwell records, came when her father led his children on a cautious journey westward until they reached the mission compound at Warburton, stared over the fence from a safe distance, then retreated to the bush. Born around 1935 in Yumara, she was the wife of John Bennett Tjapangati, one of the original artists at Papunya in the 1970s. Together they walked in from the bush to Haasts Bluff settlement and later moved to Kintore. She was instrumental in the development of the Haasts Bluff and Kintore Women's Painting Camp in 1994. It was at Yanda Art, under Chris Simons, that she hit her creative peak, pouring out large complex canvases depicting her ancestral rockholes in dark curved lines on white shimmering grounds. The result, Rothwell wrote, was a suite of paintings that now fill the great private Aboriginal art collections of the world and change hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Rothwell also wrote the introduction to the monograph The Art of Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett) by Ken McGregor and Ralph Hobbs, which reproduces this work on page 168 among a group of closely related canvases painted in 2010. Untitled 2010 is a large canvas in warm amber-gold, overlaid with flowing contour lines in near-black from which concentric oval and circular forms rise in deep burgundy, each surrounded by a halo of spiralling lines that dissolve back into the broader field. It is Country seen simultaneously from above and from within.