Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri Australian Aboriginal Art.The Last Tribe
Enquire
200 cm x 120 cm
Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri is son of Papalya Nangala and Waku Tjungurrayi he is one of Australias most Acclaimed artists, Warlimpirrnga lived in the desert, avoiding any contact with Westerners. (b. circa late 1950s) & members of his family—including younger sister Yukultji Napangati lived a nomadic life as hunter-gatherers in the Gibson and Great Sandy Desert regions of Australia with little or no outside contact until 1984. His artworks, which have become leading international exponents of contemporary painting from Australia, depict undulating landscapes that oscillate with visual energy. Few painters can match the optical intensity found in his work. Shimmering like a mirage, they pulse and swirl, hovering between the canvas and the eye like an electromagnetic field. The artist generates this effect by painting patterned backgrounds on which he meticulously adds tight, meandering lines composed of thousands of dots. These lines and switchbacks correspond to mythical stories of the Pintupi people and the formation of the desert in which they live, .
Warlimpirrnga has been featured in numerous group exhibitions at prominent institutions, including Mapa Wiya (Your Map’s Not Needed): Australian Aboriginal Art from the Fondation Opale at the Menil Collection, Houston (TX) in 2019; and No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno in 2015, which traveled to the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR) in 2015, the Pérez Art Museum Miami (FL) in 2015, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History, Detroit (MI) in 2016, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca (NY) in 2016. The artist was also featured in Documenta 13, Kassel (DE) in 2012.
Warlimpirrnga work is in the collections of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (AU); The Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge (MA); The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (AU); and The Toledo Museum of Art (OH), And also many other Important around the world.
Along with Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Walala Tjapaltjarri ,Thomas Tjapaltjarri, Yukultji Napangati, Yalti Napangati, of the Pintupi Nine are some of the most acclaimed and sought after artists of the Australian Indigenous art Movement.
The Australian
Courtesy of The Australian.
The two naked men were Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and his half-brother, Piyiti, the principal hunters in a nine- strong nomadic group that roamed a relatively small area south of Lake Mackay. The others in the group were Warlimpirrnga’s mother, Papalya Nangala, his sister Takariya, his aunt Nanu and her three adolescent children – Yalti,Yukultji and their brotherTamayinya – along with a 14-year-old male cousin, Walala Tjapaltjarri. Warlimpirrnga and Piyiti must surely have been a fearsome sight in the desert in 1984, as photographs later attested – two lean, bearded hunters in their mid-20s, their long hair tied back, clutching perfectly straightened, four-metre-long spears.
Today Warlimpirrnga is a grizzled, grey-bearded 50-something with a generous pot-belly who lives in one of Kiwirrkurra’s unprepossessing houses, surrounded by his extended family of children, grandchildren and great-grand-children. A wily storyteller whose recollections are not always to be taken literally, his story first became widely known via the 2000 television series Australia: Beyond The Fatal Shore,presented by Robert Hughes. An inveterate traveller and artist of some stature, he was sitting on a kitchen chair in his front yard one recent morning, clutching a two-litre bottle of Diet Coke and recalling younger days when he could launch a spear from his lankurru (woomera) with such deadly force that it would bring down a camel. “Yes, I speared a camel – young one,” he says through an interpreter. “Cut off that meat with an axe made from stone. Good feed – all my family ate that camel.”