Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

Painted for Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, in 1981 (catalogue number 3)

Gallery A, Sydney

Private Collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above in 1981

Acquired from the above by the present owner with the assistance of Tim Klingender Fine Art, Sydney, in 2019

One of Australia’s great twentieth century painters, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri is a doyen of the Papunya school of painting.¹ One of the most innovative and experimental of artists, Tjapaltjarri created map-like images of his country based on traditional and European cartography familiar to him after years of interacting with the most recent settlers in central Australia. These works stand in contrast to the highly formal paintings by Tjapaltjarri such as Honey Ant Dreaming at Anardeli (Mount Denison). The work is comparable to Yinyalingi (Honey Ant Dreaming Story), painted two years later, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.²

In Honey Ant Dreaming at Anardeli (Mount Denison) Tjapaltjarri has depicted a series of locales where honey ants cluster, with two figures seated on opposite sides. In between are lines of a type of caterpillar that emerges from the earth after rain in the hotter months of the year. The two thin white horizontals in the upper and lower registers of the paintings are likely to represent the morning mists that rise in the colder months. While the image may appear to show women collecting the sweet delicacy, the formal composition is suggestive of ritual and by extension the ancestral realm.

¹ Patrick McCaughey, ex-director of the National Gallery of Victoria, and of the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Yale Center for British Art, singles out Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri as three of the major Australian artists of the twentieth century. See McCaughey, P., Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2014, p. 19.

² See Vivien Johnson, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2003, p. 141; and Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art, Thames and Hudson, World of Art series, 2025, p. 133, pl. 106.