Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri

From first contact with Europeans in the remote Gibson Desert in 1984, to showing at dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 and a solo exhibition in New York in 2015, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri’s trajectory in the world of art has been meteoric. The formal nature of paintings such as Tarkul, 1999, reflects a similar transition from art made within the inner sanctum of ritual to art made for the public sphere. The work adheres to the canon of imagery relating to the Tingari ancestors. The matrix of roundels indicating site connected by the parallel lines tracking the ancestors’ paths are rendered in a stylised, systematic manner to create a sensory mind-map of country and a mnemonic for the associated song-lines of the Tingari.

Tarkul, 1999, was painted in the year leading up to the landmark exhibition of desert painting, Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, where Tjapaltjarri collaborated with a number of other male Pintupi artists to create a ground painting featuring a similar design for the vernissage.

Wally Caruana