Gulumbu Yunupingu

Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory
Collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl, Miami, USA

Henry F. Skerritt, ed., Marking the infinite : Contemporary women artists from Aboriginal Australia : from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Reno, NV : Nevada Museum of Art ; Munich : DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2016, pp.144-145 (illus.).

Marking the infinite : Contemporary women artists from Aboriginal Australia : from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, September 7, 2016–January 1, 2017
Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum Florida International University, Miami, FL, January 28–May 7, 2017
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ, September 23, 2017–January 21, 2018
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, February 17–May 13, 2018
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, June 2–September 9, 2018
Museum of Anthropology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, November 1, 2018–February 24, 2019

The human condition is at the core of Gulumbu Yunupingu’s paintings, expressed through a metaphor of the constellations of the night sky. Gulumbu was taught to paint on sheets of eucalyptus bark by her father Munggurrawuy Yunupingu (c.1905-1979), a renowned clan leader, an advocate for his people – the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land – in the face of foreign intrusion, and an exceptionally gifted artist. Well versed in the Yolngu styles of bark painting that incorporate detailed clan patterns, geometric compositional structures and figurative representations, in 1999 Gulumbu Yunupingu embarked on a series of paintings that depicted ganyu, the constellations of stars in the night sky. These and subsequent paintings relate to ancestral chronicles about the constellations: one about the Seven Sisters who went about in their canoe collecting food; and another about Two Sisters, Gudhaykudhay and Nhayay in dispute over the Possum Man. In these works, however, narrative and conventional compositional structures give way to emotions where the paintings encompass a more universal theme ‘focused on the primary metaphysical idea of the unity of people within the cosmos’.[1]

Wally Caruana

1. Howard Morphy in Brody, A.M. et al, Larrakitj: Kerry Stokes Collection, Australian Capital Equity, Perth, 2011, p.180.