Charlie Tarawa Tjugurrayi circa 1921-1999

Painted in Central Australia during 1991 and 1993
Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, catalogue number CT93/910815
Private collection, France

Wati: les homes de loi, Passage de Retz, Paris, 28 June- 8 September 2002

Catalogue de l’exposition Wati, Wati: les hommes de loi, Passage de Retz, Paris, 28 June- 8 September 2002

Cf. For extensive discussion and illustrations of the artist's work see Andrew Crocker, Charlie Tarawa Tjungurrayi – A Retrospective 1970-1986, Orange City Council, Orange, 1987; for two late paintings by the artist see Hetti Perkins and Hannah Fink, Papunya Tula, Genesis and Genius, AGNSW, Sydney, 2000, pp.104-105; Vivien Johnson, ‘The Intelligence of Pintupi Painting’ in Andrew Weislogel, Icons of The Desert, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, 2009, pp.66-69, for discussion of the artist and his significance.

Accompanying documentation reads in part, ‘This painting depicts designs associated with Kwala, the Iceman at the site of Tjiterurnga. This is a range to the west of the Kintore Community. The site is guarded by Kwala, who is said to look after the sacred stones at this site. The brown areas depict the hills in the area and the white sections of the work depict the ice.’

Iceman Dreaming is a remarkable painting and one of the artist’s last major works. Painted 20 years after he commenced painting for Geoffrey Bardon in 1971, it depicts the Iceman Dreaming associated with his birthplace of Tjiterurngu. Reminiscent of the great Kimberley artist Rover Thomas’s topographical depictions of country, it shows the landscape and the ancestral tales held within from an aerial perspective, free from the typical desert conventions and visual language of lines, roundels and dotting. 

Tjungurrayi was one of the founding painters of the Western Desert painting movement, and the first to be honoured with a retrospective Charlie Tarawa Tjungurrayi – A Restrospective in 1987, curated by Andrew Crocker, which toured six institutions in Australia including the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. In the accompanying catalogue, Andrew Crocker recounts a story of how he once asked, ‘Old Man, why do you paint this story?’, to which the artist’s answer surprised him: ‘If I don’t paint this story some whitefella might come and steal my country’. (Crocker, op. cit., p.11)

Crocker was the art advisor and Manager of Papunya Tula Artists from 1980 to 1981, and he and Tjungurrayi developed a close personal relationship. In 1982 they travelled to England, where the artist painted a series of paintings relating to his mythology of the Iceman at Tjutururnga (Crocker, op. cit., p.38). The following year they travelled to Amsterdam together, where he participated in a performance and film with Ulay and Marina Abramovic as part of their “Nightsea Crossing” series. 

Dr. Vivien Johnson has noted that his late paintings with…’the gritty ochre-like white surfaces, often applied to the canvas with his fingers as in the ceremonial context, were at odds with the dominant style of Pintupi men’s painting of the time, which favoured neat grids of circles and connecting lines of travel. Nowadays, Wadama’s works in this style are keenly sought after’ (Johnson, op. cit., p.66). This painting is perhaps the most ‘gritty’ and abstracted of all.