Gallery 1

Friday April 12 at 6.30pm

When over 35 senior male artists paint the great stories of their ancestral lands, the stories are bound to be vast and impressive.

Japingka Gallery presents an exhibition of significant Men’s paintings that focus on Landmarks of identity – places and sites that mark out identity in the homelands of the artists. The locations cover sites from the north-west Kimberley to the Western and Central Deserts.

Exhibition runs from the 12 April to 22 May 2013

When three brothers Walimpirrnga, Walala and Thomas Tjapaltjarri came into the settlement of Kiwirrkurra nearly thirty years ago, with their family group of nine people, they were amongst the last to leave their Pintupi desert homelands and nomadic life in the Gibson Desert.

They had roamed the waterholes around Lake Mackay, and had lived their traditional connection to the Dreamtime sires of their ancestors. It is these ancient Pintupi Dreaming stories that the three bothers now paint, transferring onto canvas what they previously expressed by drawing in the sand and by painting their bodies for ceremonies.

Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri painted his story only in the last four years of his life. His paintings depict the ancestral white cockatoo Dreaming story of his birthplace, Pirupa Alka, near the Olgas in Central Australia. This is the Creation story of the landforms in Bill Whiskey’s country, at the site at Katamala Cone.

The narrative exists as an ancient Dreaming specific to the Pitjantjatjara people of the Kata Tjuta region, but it was not one which had been previously painted. It is a narrative for which Bill Whiskey devised a specific iconography, created using the general conventions of Western Desert painting. The creative output of impressive white paintings was a new chapter in a very ancient lineage.

Senior men of the Kimberley – Paddy Bedford, Rover Thomas, Paddy Jaminji, Freddie Timms, Jack Britten and Jack Dale – all grew up surrounded by the cattle station culture on the Kimberley grasslands, and lived their working lives as stockmen on the large pastoral leases around their home country. By absorbing the distinctive features of terrain, soil type and geographic markers on the land, these men later painted in ochre the large planar maps of the country that also made reference to the Ngarrangkarni or Dreaming events that took place here.

The extensive stories that underlie these profound artworks give a depth to the artistic heritage that is on show in the exhibition Landmarks and Law Grounds: Men of the Desert at Japingka Gallery until 22 May.

View exhibition online here: Landmarks and Law Grounds

3 August to 12 September 2012

Japingka Gallery presents an exhibition of two of the great colourists of the Central Desert art movement, Kudditji Kngwarreye (born c 1928) and the late Lorna Napurrula Fencer (c1924 – 2006). These two distinctive Indigenous artists are known for their large dynamic paintings, made powerful and electric by the colour they bring to their work. Their creative output has helped expand the realm of traditional story-telling and painting as expressed by Central Desert artists.

Lorna Napurrula Fencer is acknowledged as one of the great innovators of the Warlpiri art movement from Lajamanu, and was both a fierce and gentle custodian of her culture. Japingka Gallery worked closely with Lorna Napurrula during the last eight years of her life, and witnessed the great range and intensity of her paintings as she prepared work for exhibitions to be held around the country.

Lorna’s subjects included the great Napurrula-Nakamarra creation stories from her brother’s custodial site at Yurmurrpa. These ceremonial stories re-enact the myths of the Ancestors who pulled out the first yarla, or bush potato, from the earth around the underground water source at Yurmurrpa.

Lorna Napurrula’s large epic canvases created in the eighth decade of her life were final and compelling statements about the power of the great Warlpiri stories that she painted for over twenty years.

The retrospective exhibition of Lorna Napurrula’s work entitled ‘Yulyurlu’ is touring nationally and has exhibited in Northern Territory, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. Lorna Napurrula Fencer is represented in the Australian National Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria, in State Galleries and major private collections including Artbank, the Gantner Myer, Holmes à Court, Kerry Stokes, Margaret Carnegie, Laverty and Leewuin Estate collections.

Kudditji Kngwarreye is an elder of the Eastern Anmatyerre country from Alhalkere on the Utopia homelands, and was born around 1928, the younger brother of renowned Utopia artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Kudditji Kngwarreye has painted for over twenty five years, and constantly represents his traditional country around Boundary Bore on the Utopia homelands, the country for which he is a custodian. Significant throughout this country are the Emu Dreaming sites, where major men’s initiation ceremonies are performed. The Emu Dreaming is one of Kudditji’s inherited ancestral totems, and is regularly referred to in his paintings.

Kudditji’s great paintings evoke the lyrical images of his country by concentrating on the colour and form of the landscape. Using densely applied paint to create broad sweeps of colour, he creates images of the intense skies of the desert rainy season and the extreme heat of high summer. A sense of immense space can be felt in the paintings.

The work of these two great artists will be on view at Japingka Gallery from 3 August to 12 September 2012. Or view online here.