60cm x 165cm

Artist: Willy Tjungurrayi
Acrylic on Linen
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About the Artwork – Men's Ceremony

In men's ceremony, the elders prepare the ceremonial ground, supervise the painting of the dancers with the appropriate designs and accompany the performance by singing ritual songs, to the accompaniment of boomerangs or clapping sticks. Many of the men's Dreaming paintings have also been sung while they were being painted.

About the Artist - Willy Tjungurrayi

One of the most sought-after painters of the Western Desert, Willy Tjungurrayi was a senior Pintupi man, entitled by his ancestry and communal position to paint the sacred and secret Tingari cycle. He has been acknowledged as one of the great colourists of contemporary Aboriginal painting.

Willy was the middle one of three brothers; Yala Yala Gibbs (founding member of the Papunya art movement and senior custodian of secret/sacred men business) was the eldest and George Ward Tjungurrayi the youngest.

Willy Tjungurrayi was born around 1932 at Patjantja. He came into Haast's Bluff in 1956 with other Pintupi people, and in 1959 Willy was trucked across to Papunya with most of the other Aboriginal residents due to problems with Haasts Bluff's water supply. Willy began painting for Papunya Tula Artists in 1976. By the 1980s Willy was recognized as a senior Pintupi painter, and he joined the movement of return to the Pintupi homelands.

Stories from the Tingari Dreaming song cycle, and the land around Haast's Bluff, Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay) and Kaakuratintja (Lake MacDonald), are Willy Tjungarrayi's two great linked themes. For some subjects Willy paints dozens of dotted Roundels (concentric circles), linked by parallel lines, the spaces between them filled with bright, flat primary and mixed colors, a depiction of the travels and stopping places of the Tingari Men, an image of the rhythmic repetition of the songs associated with the Tjukurpa (Creation era or Dreaming).

More recently, Tjungarrayi's paintings feature hundreds of endless wavy lines in an ochre monochrome shimmer across the canvas on a pale background. These paintings illustrate (or witness, might be more correct) the sand hills and the fierce hailstorm that killed the ancestral Tingari Men in the Dreamtime.

Collections

Aboriginal Art Museum, The Netherlands

Artbank

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra

The Holmes a Court Collection, Perth

The Kelton Foundation, Santa Monica

Hank Ebes Collection, Melbourne

The Luczo Family Collection, USA

Corrigan Collection, Sydney

History

Selected Group Exhibitions:

 2020 Pointillism Perfection, Art Mob, Hobart

2019 Desert Painters of Australia, Larry Gagosian Gallery, New York, USA - from the Steve Martin & Anne Springfield Collections and Kluge-Ruhe Collection of the University of Virginia, USA

2019 Defining Tradition: the first wave & its disciples, Kate Owen Gallery, Sydney

2017 Constellation, Paul Johnstone Gallery, Darwin

2010 Lost Tribe, Kate Owen Gallery, Sydney

2004 Papunya Tula Artists, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne

2004 Australian Aboriginal Art Collector's Exhibition, Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne

2003 Kintore Kiwirrkura, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne

1994 Central Australian Aboriginal Art and Craft Exhibition, Araluen Centre, Alice Springs

1994 Yiribana, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

1991 The Painted Dream: Contemporary Aboriginal Paintings from the Tim and Vivien Johnson Collection, Auckland City Art Gallery and Te Whare Taonga o Aoteroa National Art Gallery, New Zealand.

1989 Aboriginal Art: The Continuing Tradition, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

1988 Australian Aboriginal Graphics from the Collection of the Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide

1987 Art and Aboriginality, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth, UK

1985 Dot and Circle, a retrospective survey of the Aboriginal acrylic paintings of Central Australia, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne.

1983 Papunya: paintings from the Central Australian Desert, touring exhibition, America and Europe.

1982 Georges Gallery, Melbourne; Brisbane Festival; Mori Gallery, Sydney.