PRINCE OF WALES (MIDPUL) CIRCA 1935- 2002 | Body Marks

Painted in Darwin in 2000
Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin, Northern Territory
The Laverty Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in October 2000
Bonham’s, The Laverty Collection: Contemporary Australian Art, Sydney, 24 March 2013, lot 41
The Dennis and Debra Scholl Collection, Miami

Darwin, Karen Brown Gallery, at the Melbourne Art Fair, October 2000
Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Ngurra Kutu: Going Home, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, September 2001 - June 2002
New Plymouth, New Zealand, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, Paintings from Remote Communities: Indigenous Australian Art from the Laverty Collection, Sydney,15 December 2007 – 24 February 2008, and additional venue: 
Newcastle Region Art Gallery, New South Wales, 5 July – 31 August 2008
Nevada, Nevada Museum of Art, No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, 13 February to 13 May 2015, and additional venues:
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, 20 June to 16 August 2015
Pérez Art Museum, Miami, 17 September 2015 to 3 January 2016
Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, 18 January to 15 May 2016
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, New York, 9 June to 14 August 2016

Rhana Devenport and Will Owen, Paintings from Remote Communities: Indigenous Australian Art from the Laverty Collection, Sydney, exh. cat., New Zealand: Govett Brewster Art Gallery, 2007, p.249 (illus.)
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia's Remote Aboriginal Communities - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2008, p.254 (illus.)
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Australian Aboriginal Art - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Edition II, Melbourne: Kleimeyer Industries, 2011, p.285 (illus.)
Henry F. Skerritt, ed. et al, No Boundaries: Australian Aboriginal Contemporary Abstract Painting, Prestel Verlag, Munich-London-New York, 2014, p.64 , p.10 (illus. detail), p.73 (illus.)

Synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen, painted to extremities of linen which has then been strip-lined on to white canvas for stretching. Please note their are numerous scratches, smudges and marks on the white area that surrounds the central painting and on the edges of the stretched canvas, consistent with handling. Otherwise the work is in very good condition overall with no visible evidence of repair or restoration, although white borders could benefit from professional cleaning.
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The Larrakia ceremonial designs that are the basis of Midpul’s paintings are known to have been handed down by tradition over countless generations. The earliest evidence of the detail of these designs dates to the 1880s as is seen in the photographs of Larrakia taken by Paul Foelsche, the first police inspector in the Northern Territory from 1870 to 1904, based in Palmerston (later renamed Darwin).¹ Although the photographs were taken as ethnographic records, they are valuable not only in recording known ancestors of Larrakia people today, but also for the details of ritual body painting designs that adorned their bodies. These include patterns of dots within marked rectangles, as well as the designs of cicatrices cut into the skin over a lifetime as symbols of ritual rank, depth of ancestral knowledge and authority. The panoply of designs finds its expression in the paintings of Prince of Wales. One of the large canvases by Midpul that he painted late in life, Body Marks, 2000, is distinguished by a luminous blue/black ground which replicates the skin colour of Larrakia performers in ritual. In contrast to the matrix of white dots on a black grid and the tonal variations in blue lend the painting a sense of three-dimensional depth.

For a related painting on a similar scale see Body Marks, 2001, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.²

WC

1 Lee, G.M., in Arts Backbone, ANKAAA, Darwin, Vol. 4, issue 4, December 2004, p.3. 2 Perkins, H., Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004, p.167