UTA UTA TJUNGALA | UNTITLED (CEREMONY - LARGE TWIN CEREMONIAL OCCASION)

Painted in 1971 and purchased from the Papunya School Art room in early 1972 

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Origins of Western Desert Art: Tjukurrtjanu, 30 September 2011-12 February 2012

Musee du quai Branly, Paris, 9 October 2012-20 January 2013

This work, together with an annotated diagram, is illustrated in G. Bardon’s, Papunya, p. 111, painting no. 28

Morphy, 1998, p. 124, pl. 78; for a related painting depicting a ceremonial ground utilizing similar iconography, in the collection of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, titled Medicine Story.

Uta Uta Tjangala was one of the first Pintupi men to join the original painting group at the Aboriginal settlement of Papunya in 1971 that was to revolutionize Aboriginal desert art, and eventually Indigenous art in Australia. The introduction of European painting materials by the school teacher Geoffrey Bardon at Papunya offered artists few challenges and allowed for a fair degree of experimentation as they sought to express in paint their relationship to distant ancestral lands. The one constant element in the new paintings was the lexicon of desert iconography that is applied to men’s bodies in ceremony, on the ritual ground itself and onto sacred objects. Although in the main artists restricted themselves to using the traditional palette of red and yellow ochres, black and white, there were a number of exceptions, such as in this work where Uta Uta Tjangala has depicted the symbols for the ceremonial men in red and blue enamel paint in what would have been a daring innovation, made culturally acceptable due to the high ritual status of the artist.

Bardon’s documentation accompanying this painting interprets it as two adjacent ceremonial grounds with men (the U-shapes) sitting facing each other. The men are separated by horizontal bars that represent spears or clubs. The painting relates to a number of small boards painted by the artist in 1971 now in the collection of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, illustrated in Scholes, Like (ed.), Tjungunutja: From having come together, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 2017, pp. 14-17.

The painting was originally acquired from the Papunya School Art Room in early 1972 by Mr and Mrs W. L. Jackson who worked alongside Geoffrey Bardon at the Papunya school. Untitled (Ceremony - Large Twin Ceremonial Occasion) is one of a suite of twelve of the earliest paintings ever executed at Papunya in 1971 that were purchased by the Jacksons, direct from Bardon in early 1972, at an exhibition ‘to raise more money to buy painting supplies’. These ‘early’ works had been painted on scraps of timber, off cuts, floor tiles, and painted in a variety of mediums, ‘all about the place’, as the artists were ‘working in small groups’, and ‘in their barricaded space behind the classroom’, while others painted in ‘the settlement office’ and in Bardon’s apartment.

Credit: Personal correspondence with Mr W.L. Jackson and Sotheby's, 1999.

Wally Caruana