Property from a private collection, Australia
John Mawurndjul
MARDAYIN AT DILEBANG, 2005
Lot Closed
December 4, 11:38 PM GMT
Estimate
70,000 - 100,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Property from a private collection, Australia
John Mawurndjul
born circa 1952
MARDAYIN AT DILEBANG, 2005
Natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark
Bears a signed Maningrida Arts & Culture label on the reverse stating catalogue number 5172-05, artist's name, language, region, moiety and subsection, also an Annandale Galleries, Sydney label with stock number M475
56 3/4 in by 34 1/4 in (144 cm by 87 cm)
Annandale Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above
A painter of light, in Mardayin at Dilebang, 2005, John Mawurndjul has created a luminous mnemonic of ceremonies conducted at a sacred place. Swathes of finely cross-hatched rarrk ripple across the surface of the painting as a river flowing around two freshwater springs. The rarrk is set upon a white ground to produce a radiant effect–a visual metaphor for the light of revelation that finds a counterpart in rituals where participants, their bodies painted in similar designs, gain ancestral knowledge. Mawurndjul describes the site of Dilebang as the home to an ancestral Rainbow Serpent with a Carpentaria palm tree protruding from her back; it is also the site of a cemetery containing the bones of the artist’s forbears.1
Mardayin at Dilebang was painted in the year the Museum Tinguely in Basel and the Sprengel Museum in Hanover hosted the artist’s retrospective exhibition, Rarrk–John Mawurndjul–Journey through time in Northern Australia.
Wally Caruana
1. Mawurndjul, J., John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2018, p.135.