Aboriginal Art
Aboriginal Art
White Painting, 2010
Auction Closed
May 25, 09:41 PM GMT
Estimate
10,000 - 15,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Nyapanyapa Yunupingu
Circa 1945 - 2021
White Painting, 2010
Earth pigments on bark
52 in by 35 ⅜ in (132 by 90 cm)
Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory, catalogue number 3589M
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Paddington, Sydney
Gwyn Hanssen Pigott OAM, Ipswich, Queensland
By descent from the above
Private Collection, Melbourne
Mossgreen Auctions, Melbourne, Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Art, 22 July 2014, lot 69
Private Collection, acquired at the above auction
Painted in 2009 and 2010, the artist describes this series of barks known as the 'white paintings’ as ‘meaningless’. A series of them were exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia in unDisclosed: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial in 2012. In the accompanying catalogue essay to the Triennial, curator Franchesca Cubillo writes:
"[...] during 2009, Nyapanyapa removed the figurative elements from her work so that only the layered coloured segments of crosshatching remained; this is called ‘mayilimiriw’. The literal translation of ‘mayilimiriw’ is ‘meaningless’; that is, they have no Dreaming narrative; however, they are not devoid of substance. These works no longer exist as landscapes in a horizontal plane, but rather are transferred onto a vertical plane. They can also be read as landscapes from a topographical perspective and not a lineal plane. This is an innovative departure from bark painting traditions as, in the past, vertical bark paintings tended to refer to body painting. Nyapanyapa’s ‘white paintings’ are mayilimiriw. They are unpretentious intuitive white waves of free-flowing crosshatching. One gets a sense of the melodic rhythm of the ocean’s competing currents. The works are like random movements of white foam on the shoreline as the ocean tides advance and recede." (Franchesca Cubillo, unDisclosed: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2012).
See also Will Stubbs, "Art of the Artless", in Henry F. Skerritt, ed., Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Reno and Munich, 2016, for discussion of the artist, her life and artistic practice.