Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi

One of the doyens of the Western Desert painting movement, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi belonged to the initial group of artists at the settlement of Papunya who commenced painting in the introduced materials of acrylic and composition board in 1971. A member of the Pintupi language group, Tjungurrayi translated the designs associated with the ancestral Tingari beings and their esoteric teachings traditionally etched into the surfaces of ritual objects onto canvas.

Possum Dreaming at Wapintja, 1989, is a representation of a classical Pintupi design that is composed as a grid formed by sets of concentric circles, indicating significant places, joined by bands of parallel straight lines indicating the journeys of the Tingari across the desert landscape, from one site to another. Pintupi paintings such as this excluded practically all other elements of the iconography of desert graphic art to produce minimal images that allow the eye to wander across the canvas, evoking the essence of the spiritual powers embedded in the earth by the Tingari.

Wally Caruana