ANATJARI TJAKAMARRA

Painted at Kiwirrkura for Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs
Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne
Sotheby's Aboriginal Art, Sydney, 28 - 29 July 2003, lot 178
Private collection, USA

Aboriginal Paintings from the Desert: Paintings by Australian Artists from Papunya, Balgo Hills and Utopia, Union of Soviet Artists Gallery, Moscow, May - June 1991 and Museum of Ethnographic Art, St Petersburg, November 1991 - January 1992

Cf. For analysis of the artists' early paintings see Myers, F.R., Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002

Pizzi, G., Aboriginal Paintings from the Desert: Paintings by Australian Artists from Papunya, Balgo Hills and Utopia, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 1991, illus. p47

The work is in good and stable condition with no signs of restoration or repairs. In minimalist black box frame.
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This painting is sold with a copy of the original Papunya Tula certificate that reads in part: 'This painting depicts designs associated with the travels of the Tingari Men from the site of Kulkuta south-east of the Baron Range towards, Lake MacDonald.'

Anatjari Tjakamarra was part of the original group of painters at Papunya in 1971 to 1975 when he elaborated and experimented with variations on the Tingari theme.  It was a time when the artist was heavily involved in Tingari rituals (Myers 2002:86).  During this period he  developed a series of paintings featuring a symmetrical five-circle grid leading to images of floating roundels not joined by lines and free of other icons or designs.  In such works the roundels often represent freshwater rockholes and are symbolically relative to the size and ancestral importance of the waterholes.

The rockholes are also transformations of the participants in Tingari rituals: the larger roundels represent elders while the smaller circles represent initiates (Myers 2002:95).  The large number of circles in the paintings also indicates the sheer number of participants, emphasising the interest in continuing traditional practices in contemporary times.

This painting is an excellent example of Tingari images which the artist refined in the larger canvases of the last years of his life.  Such paintings emphasise the ancestral forces at work during Tingari ceremonies through the creation of a visually vibrant painted surface, as in this case, and with minimal use of ancillary icons.

For most of the 1980s the artist painted independently of Papunya Tula Artists but returned to the cooperative in the late 1980s, when he moved to the newly established outstation of Kiwirrkura.  He had solo exhibitions at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in 1989 and 1991.

In 1989, the artist exhibited similar works at the John Weber Gallery in New York from which the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Tingari Cycle Dreaming, the first work of  contemporary  Aboriginal art to be purchased by the Museum.