Prince of Wales (Midpul)

Painted in Darwin, 1999

Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin

Private Collection, Perth, Western Australia.

Bonhams, Sydney, Aboriginal Art, June 28, 2011, lot 31

The Dennis and Debra Scholl Collection, Miami

Sotheby's, London, Aboriginal Art, March 14, 2018, lot 39

Private Collection

Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, February 13 - May 13, 2015; additional venues:

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, June 20 - August 16, 2015. Pérez Art Museum, Miami, September 17, 2015 - January 3, 2016

Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, January 18 - May 15, 2016

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, New York, June 9 - August 14, 2016

Henry F. Skerritt, (ed. et al), No Boundaries: Australian Aboriginal Contemporary Abstract Painting, Munich-London-New York, 2014, p.63, p.69 (illus.)

The Larrakia are salt-water people; their historic exclusion from their traditional land threatened to force them away from their life-source, the coasts on the Arafura Sea. In the first decades of the twentieth century Midpul’s father Imabul protested against the government’s intention to relocate the Larrakia inland.¹ While Midpul’s preferred background colour for his paintings is often white, he experimented with a range of primary and secondary hues. Blue, however, is one colour that emphasizes the Larrakia connection with the sea. In Untitled (Body Marks), 1999, the optical effect of vertical lines of white dots interwoven with a matrix of black spots against the blue ground suggests the sparkle of light of the surface of water, that in traditional Aboriginal art aesthetics alludes to the expression in paint of the presence of ancestral forces. 

Wally Caruana, Sotheby's, London, Aboriginal Art, March 14, 2018, lot 39

References

¹ Emily McDaniel, ‘Prince of Wales (Midpul): “I make the marks”, in Henry F. Skerritt, ed. et al, No Boundaries: Australian Aboriginal Contemporary Abstract Painting, Prestel Verlag, Munich-London-New York, 2014, p.62, refers to an article in The Northern Standard in 1936 as quoting Imabul along these lines.