Yukultji Napangati

The paintings of Yukultji Napangarti possess a haptic quality that relates to desert women’s practice of sketching narratives in the sand. Each meticulously applied line of dotted paint builds to a crescendo that shimmers with ancestral power permeating the painted landscape. In Women’s Ceremonies at Marrapinti there is no central focus: the landscape unfolds across the canvas evoking the timelessness of the Tjukurrpa (Dreaming), of the cyclic nature of Pintupi cosmology. Yukultji’s painting technique also refers to the weaving of hair-string skirts worn in ceremony while the term ‘marrapinti’ is eponymous with the nose bones worn by women in rituals.

Yukuljti Napangarti has a special place in contemporary Aboriginal women’s art. Along with Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, she was a member of a family group in the Gibson Desert who first encountered Europeans as recently as 1984. At the time, male artists dominated the Papunya Tula painting movement until, one decade later, a group of senior women artists painted a number of large collaborative canvases near the Pintupi settlements of Kiwirrkura and Kintore, before embarking on their own individual careers as artists. About twenty-four years old at the time, the experience launched Yukultji’s painting career. In 2018 she was awarded the prestigious Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and Salon 94 Bowery in New York staged a highly successful exhibition of her work in 2019.

Wally Caruana