JOSEPH JURRA TJAPALTJARRI

Joseph Jura has been painting for the Papunya Tula cooperative since the mid to late 1980s and has twice acted as Chairman of the company. His only solo exhibition was with Gabrielle Pizzi at the end of the 1980s although his works have been exhibited widely by the company in group shows since 2008. He is an artist whose work falls into two distinct periods and styles. Apart from one single work, his paintings have appeared regularly at auction since 1996 and between that year and 2007, 30 paintings were offered at public sales. The vast majority of these were in the traditional Pintupi style developed by the Papunya artists during the 1980s and, of these works 15 sold for a career success rate of 50% at that time.

Jurra's post-2000 works only began appearing regularly at auction from 2009 onwards, and these works have proven to be far less successful than those of many of his contemporaries who were the most prominent initiators of the aesthetically minimal Pintupi men's painting style. In fact, while Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, George Tjungurrayai, George Ward and Turkey Tolson have success rates at least 10-20% higher, Joseph Jurra's clearance rate has fallen during the last 10 years to currently languish at 35%. His record price was set in 2015 when a 153 x 122 cm untitled work created in 2009 sold for $33,600 at the Deutscher & Hackett sale of the Laverty Collection at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. This eclipsed the previous record of $26,400 that had stood since 2006. The highest price paid for a work in his early style, typified by interconnecting roundels was the $11,400 that was paid for a 182 x 182 cm work titled Kangaroo Dreaming at Ngamurrinya 1989, purchased at Sotheby's in 2001. It was a record price at that time and stood for a further 4 years until eclipsed by a painting much more in keeping with the new minimalist style being practiced by the most successful of his male contemporaries. His last 6 auctionappearances, from the end of 2015 to the end of 2017, have been unsuccessful.

In 2000, the first year that the AIAM100 statistics were collated, Joseph Jurra was ranked 166 amongst the most important Aboriginal artists of the movement. He rose steadily through the ranks to be 133rd by 2002, 113th by 2007 and reached 102nd by 2010. However poor results over the following 4 years saw his ranking drop to 107th by 2014. With a new record price set in 2015 and 3 of the 4 works on offer sold, Jurra had another short rise before he dropped once again to 109th by early 2018. He is, however, an artist who has produced a significant body of fine paintings, and his status should be seen in the light of the general favour in which Papunya works are held. As Pintupi art wins greater admiration, so too will the best works by this important artist.

© Adrian Newstead