Wangulkarratja - Muntarri Dreaming, 1984

synthetic polymer paint on canvas board

76 x 38 cm

Est. $3,500 – $4,500

Hammer $4,200

Provenance: Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, Alice Springs, NT, Cat No. YY 841238 Private Collection, Vic Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd
Artwork story: The Tingari travelled across vast stretches of the Western Desert, these ancestral figures moved through the country performing ceremonies, shaping sites and inscribing the land with the song cycles that Pintupi men carry and transmit today. As the Papunya Tula Artists documentation for this work records, a large group of Tingari Men visited Wangulkarratja, a large rockhole south-west of Kintore, during their travels west to Mantati. Since events associated with the Tingari Cycle are of a sacred nature, no further detail was given. The painting maps that passage. Large concentric circles, each one a rockhole site, are distributed along the vertical axis and connected by lines of dotting that trace the Tingari route across country. The background is filled throughout with parallel wavy lines in deep ochre and brown, the marks of country moving continuously beneath the track. It is a composition of sustained linear authority, the kind of structure Geoff Bardon, who first brought Yala Yala to a painting surface in 1971, described as the work of a man who gave himself to painting with complete seriousness. Yala Yala was born around 1924 south-west of Lake Macdonald and was approximately forty years old when he and his family walked out of their remote homelands to Papunya in 1963. He was among the first artists to develop the grid style of concentric circles and connecting lines that most Pintupi painters had adopted by the end of the 1970s, and by the time of his death in 1998 was one of the last still working in it. His widow, Ningura Napurrula, became one of the leading names in Western Desert art in the years that followed.

Catalogues202 of 257

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Sale 3 · Lot 54

Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi

c.1925 – 1998

Region: Western Desert
Community: Papunya
Language group: Pintupi

Wangulkarratja - Muntarri Dreaming, 1984

synthetic polymer paint on canvas board

76 x 38 cm

Est. $3,500 – $4,500

Hammer $4,200

Provenance: Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, Alice Springs, NT, Cat No. YY 841238 Private Collection, Vic Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd
Artwork story: The Tingari travelled across vast stretches of the Western Desert, these ancestral figures moved through the country performing ceremonies, shaping sites and inscribing the land with the song cycles that Pintupi men carry and transmit today. As the Papunya Tula Artists documentation for this work records, a large group of Tingari Men visited Wangulkarratja, a large rockhole south-west of Kintore, during their travels west to Mantati. Since events associated with the Tingari Cycle are of a sacred nature, no further detail was given. The painting maps that passage. Large concentric circles, each one a rockhole site, are distributed along the vertical axis and connected by lines of dotting that trace the Tingari route across country. The background is filled throughout with parallel wavy lines in deep ochre and brown, the marks of country moving continuously beneath the track. It is a composition of sustained linear authority, the kind of structure Geoff Bardon, who first brought Yala Yala to a painting surface in 1971, described as the work of a man who gave himself to painting with complete seriousness. Yala Yala was born around 1924 south-west of Lake Macdonald and was approximately forty years old when he and his family walked out of their remote homelands to Papunya in 1963. He was among the first artists to develop the grid style of concentric circles and connecting lines that most Pintupi painters had adopted by the end of the 1970s, and by the time of his death in 1998 was one of the last still working in it. His widow, Ningura Napurrula, became one of the leading names in Western Desert art in the years that followed.