Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula circa 1942-2002 STRAIGHTENING SPEARS AT ILLYINGAUNGAU

Painted at Kintore in July 2000
Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs
Private collection, Alice Springs
Sotheby's, Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 26-27 July 2004, lot 194
Glenn Schaeffer Collection

The painting appears in very good condition overall with no apparent repairs or restorations with some very minor markings at the stretcher edge.
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Cf. For two early paintings on the theme, see Straightening spears at Ilyingaungau, 1990, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, and Mitukatjarri and Tjikari Men's Spear  Fight at Ilyingaungau, 1990, in the collection of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, Darwin, in Hetti Perkins, and Hannah Fink (eds.), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales in association with Papunya Tula Artists, 2000, pp.114-115 and pp.116-117, respectively, illus. For a late work in the series, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, see B. Kennedy et al, Developing the collection: Acquisitions 2001–2004, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2004, p.43, illus.

During the early 1980s Pintupi artists began to create highly esoteric and austere compositions featuring the repetition of marks across the canvas. This coincided with their return from the government settlement of Papunya, where the desert painting movement had its genesis a decade earlier, to live on their traditional lands further west, around the communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkura. The main themes of Pintupi paintings are associated with their major ancestors, the Tingari, whose roles in creating land and culture are of a highly sacred and secret nature. Around 1990 Turkey Tolson embarked on a series of related paintings based on the forms of fighting spears: the undulations of the painted marks across the sweep of the canvases lend the works a strong sense of landscape and atmosphere. This particular painting, one of the last of the series, conveys a strong sense of the deep reddish hue of the desert landscape at dusk.

This painting is sold with an accompanying Papunya Tula Artists certificate that reads in part: 'During mythological times a group of men camped at the site of Illyingaungau near the secret cave site of Mitukatjirri south-east of the Kintore Community. The rows of dots through this work represent spears which the men are straightening. This is done by slightly warming the spear over a fire and straightening while it is warm. These men were preparing their spears as they had heard of a possible confrontation with a group of men from the Tjikari area further north'.