Ronnie Tjampitjinpa

At not yet thirty years of age, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa was the youngest member of the first group of desert artists who translated their traditional graphic lexicon from ceremonial ground paintings and body decorations into acrylic paint on board, and later canvas, at the remote government settlement of Papunya in 1971. Surrounded by senior ritual leaders and artists, many of whom had only recently been in contact with non-Aboriginal people, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa and his cohorts revolutionised Aboriginal art, and in turn the history of art in Australia. Unto that moment, the public and academic perception of Aboriginal art focused on paintings and sculptures made from natural ochres and timbers, mainly from Arnhem Land and surrounding regions in the Northern Territory. The pictorial art of the desert was and continues to be made of ephemeral materials in ceremonial contexts, hence not seen by the public at large. Never before had ancestral designs been laid down in portable permanent media and made accessible to a wider public.

As his career developed, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa was one of the first painters to dispense with the graphic symbols of the desert visual language for intensely optical images consisting of parallel linear designs. Painted in February 2008, in the heat of the southern summer in the desert, Ngarru shimmers with the ancestral forces embedded in the earth. The work relates to an episode in the chronicles of the apical ancestors of the Pintupi and neighbouring desert groups, the Tingari who sculpted the landscape and gave people law and culture. In this instance, the ancestors lit a great bushfire at the site of Ngaru near Jupiter Well in the northwest of the Gibson Desert; people fled in two directions, to the east and to the southeast. While the painting is not a literal descriptive image, the composition suggests movement in two directions from a central hub.

Wally Caruana

This painting is sold with the accompanying Papunya Tula Artists documentation and catalogue number RT 0802152.