Tjumpo Tjapanangka circa 1929-2007

Painted at Wirramanu (Balgo Hills) Western Australia in 2002
Walayirti Artists, Catalogue number 432/02
Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Melbourne

Mythology & Reality, Contemporary Aboriginal Desert Art From the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2 October 2004 - 30 January 2005

Geoffrey Bardon, Judith Ryan, Gabrielle Pizzi, Zara Stanhope, Contemporary Aboriginal Desert Art From the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Mythology & Reality, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2004, p62, illus.

Very good overall condition, no repairs or restoration. Two small areas of marks on edge on top of raised painted dots aoround 75-80cm from top right hand corner. These could easily be cleaned by a conservator if so desired.
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Cf. Una Rey, "Tjumpo Tjapanangka - Hunting for Balgo's Contemporary Warrior" in Henry F. Skerritt (ed.), No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, DelMonico Books/Prestel, Munich-Germany-New York, 2015, for an essay regarding the artist and illustrations of related works in the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, pp. 146-164

The accompanying certificate reads, “This painting tells a part of the story of the Wati Kutjarra, a prominent dreaming in the Tanami and Great Sandy Deserts. This story takes place in the country known as Pillar, located far to the south of Balgo. Pillar is the name of a warran, or claypan, where the Wati Kutjarra came to camp. The Wati Kutjarra were two ancestral brothers who travelled large areas of the western desert teaching ancestral people about food, fire and hunting.”

In the last decade of his life, Tjumpo Tjapanangka, to visitors and art collectors, was the loved and respected elder statesman, welcoming ambassador, and ‘most venerated artist’ of the Warlayirti Art Centre at Wirrimanu (Balgo Hills), on the northern edge of the Great Sandy Desert. Then, in his seventies, he struck an imposing figure, an extraordinarily fit man, with his ‘desert-punk style - always dressed in jeans and wrap around shades’. To his fellow indigenous countrymen, for thousands of miles from the Central Deserts to the north and west, he was revered and ‘commanded defiance’ as a hugely important ceremonial leader and maparn (traditional healer), in constant demand to perform his responsibilities at events of the highest significance.

Writing with regard to a group of eight works in Tjumpo’s ‘mature style’, evident in this painting, Una Rey observes that, “At their physical core, the paintings are properly sublime (ignoring for a minute its overuse as an adjective to denote the visually superb): that is, they can inspire rapture through beauty but can also instil awe for their latent power as objects invested with the maparn’s essence” (ibid. p.149) . She goes on to note that his works carry an ‘intensity of purpose. He was steady but not prolific, meaning that, in spite of the posthumous aura that his work commands and the hunger with which it was acquired by collectors directly from the art centre, he did not have a solo exhibition in his lifetime and to date no survey show or catalogue raisoneé has laid out the full scheme of his metaphysical vision.” (ibid. p.150.)

Tjumpo Tjapanangka produced relatively few large scale paintings, and there was always a lengthy queue of the most significant art collectors and public institutions on the waiting list to acquire them. Gabrielle Pizzi, who represented the Balgo Hill’s artists from their fledgling years, managed to secure two masterworks for her personal collection. The other example, illustrated on the opposite page alongside the artist, was sold in recent years into the Debra & Dennis Scholl Collection and is currently touring American museums as part of their No Boundaries exhibition.