Willy Tjungurrayi

Painted for Papunya Tula Artists, 2001, Alice Springs catalogue number WT0103175

Private Collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above

The exacting minimalism of Kaakuratintja is characteristic of Willy Tjungurrayi’s mature style of painting. The younger brother of the renowned Pintupi painter Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi (circa 1928-1998) who was one of the original group of Papunya painters in 1971, Willy Tjungurrayi first emerged as an artist in the public domain in 1976. A decade later he became one of the leading exponents among the Pintupi painters of the matrix of circle and line compositions that map out the sacred sites and pathways of the great ancestors, the Tingari. The Tingari are described as creator beings who traversed vast stretches of what we now know as the western deserts of Australia.

They formed features of the landscape and endowed people with sacred law. Today, the esoteric knowledge of the Tingari continues to be taught to Pintupi through the various stages of ceremonial development. By the turn of the century, Willy Tjungurrayi was among a small group of Pintupi artists who introduced a style of painting that went beyond the iconographic elements of desert painting. Their paintings feature rhythmic linear compositions that pulsate with the ancestral powers imbued in the land by the Tingari, and by light – the physical light in the land and metaphoric light of revelation and attainment of knowledge. In effect, paintings such as Kaakuratintja convey a sense of the shimmering heat of the Australian desert landscape while capturing the ineffable nature of the ancestral forces that reside within it, spiritual powers that are tapped in ceremony to imbue participants within a sacred space.

Wally Caruana

Image Credits

Willy Tjungurrayi by Grant Rundell