WENTJA NAPALTJARRI | UNTITLED

Commissioned by Neil Murphy at Watiyawanu Artists, Mt Liebig, Northern Territory in 2006

The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands

This monumental work of conviction was commissioned for an exhibition at Danks Street Gallery, Sydney, held in September 2006 by Neil Murphy Indigenous Art in association with Watiyawanu Artists Corporation, Mount Liebig, Northern Territory.

On a scale never attempted before, Napaltjarri articulates with a staggering accumulation of incidents to inscribe her intimate knowledge of indigenous cultural certainties. Previously, Napaltjarri placed bold iconographic elements, concentrating the powerful image within the picture frame, often appearing suspended above shimmering fields of structured dots. Instead, in this work, Napaltjarri employs a painstaking and time consuming method, by which the gestural accumulation of dots suggests an infinite structure beyond the confines of the picture field itself. Differing from the Western tradition of representing the ‘sublime’ landscape, where the vision is expansive, yet also restricted within the frame, in this work Napaltjarri’s monumental vision appears as a mere fragment. With or without iconographic elements being present, Napaltjarri’s paintings are always distinguished by her acute understanding of the aesthetics of crafting potent statements.

Napaltjarri witnessed, and at times participated in, painting activities in Papunya in the early 1970’s alongside her father, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, one of the senior group of Pintupi artists to commence painting during Geoffrey Bardon’s initiative in Papunya during this period. Napaltjarri assumes specific authority from her father to depict his ancestral subjects and is now regarded as one of the most senior painters from the Central Desert community of Mount Liebig. Charismatic and authoritative in person, Napaltjarri paints with a palpable conviction and with an acute, reflexive intellect. Eschewing daily group painting in the communal painting shed, Napaltjarri paints alone, sitting on the floor in an empty room of her house, or occasionally on her front porch. Visits to her house were only permitted each afternoon to view the progress of a painting, and were much anticipated events. 

Since the laying out of dots would occur from 360 degrees often painting ‘up’, rather than from left to right, each day’s visit would reveal new rivulets of dots appearing like spilt milk across the canvas; ideas taking form and then halting ‘mid-sentence’ for more intensive forces to emerge elsewhere on the canvas, only to be abandoned again, or to be swallowed up by an encompassing body of dots, or to merge into a larger, conceptual whole. Each day it seemed like a new painting was astonishingly present and complete, only to be absorbed again the following day into an expanding cosmos of repetition and difference before reaching a culmination in the completed work. 

Napaltjarri would observe most attentively one’s critical response to the state of the painting on each particular day’s visit. Rather than her seeming to seek approval, she would seek an authentic response to the poetics or cerebral aspects of the work in progress. Perhaps she was fascinated by how the painting could be read from the ‘outside', or its power to affect. Very few words would be spoken, but gestures would abound.

Napaltjarri painted three works for the Danks Street exhibition, each on a scale never before attempted by the artist. Before the opening of the exhibition, one of these works was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Neil Murphy