Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri

Painted for Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, in 1996 (catalogue number MN960853)

Private Collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1996

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri was a doyen of the Papunya painting movement. He was one of the original group of painters to work in acrylic paint and a founding member of Papunya Tula Artists in 1972. This painting relates to an ancestral narrative where a group of Tingari beings, the apical ancestors of the Pintupi and other desert groups, gathered at the site at Walmulla, a wetland close to Namarari’s birth place of Marnpi, to perform dances which required one group of men to dodge spears thrown by another group. Characteristically, Namarari has drawn out the essential aspect of the narrative, the spears appear as yellow ochre, grey and white lines in alternating irregular cycles against a red ochre earth. Furthermore, the distinct clusters of spears suggest opposing forces.

A feature of this painting that Namarari developed in the last decade of his career is the absence of dotting. While he is renowned for the atmospheric fields of dots he produced throughout his career, particularly in his renditions of Tjunginpa the Marsupial Mouse, in the late 1980s, he was among the first Papunya artists to dispense with the use of dotting, preferring to ‘take the dot for a walk’ and work in lines and bands of colour. Such paintings proved to be an influence on Pintupi painters in the years that followed.

In 2017, The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, mounted a retrospective of the artist’s work: The mysteries that remain: Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, that was also shown at the Cummer Museum in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2024-25. Namarari has been represented in several major international exhibitions including Aratjara, Art of the First Australians that toured Europe in 1993-94; Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya organised by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York in 2010; Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert art, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, in 2010-11; Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art, The Kaplan & Levi Collection, at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, in 2012; and Australia, Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2013.

This painting is sold with the original documentation from Papunya Tula Artists.