Echidna, c. 1979

natural earth pigments on bark

49 x 57 cm

Est. $3,000 – $5,000

Hammer $5,500

Provenance: Lawson Menzies, Fine Aboriginal Art, Sydney, NSW, 22 November 2006, Lot 210 Private Collection, NSW, acquired from the above Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Lawson Menzies
Artwork story: Peter Marralwanga grew up in Western Arnhem Land surrounded by artists painting in rock shelters and learned to paint that way himself. The subjects of his paintings were the Djang, the ancestral beings who made his country and placed the spirits of people within it. As assimilation policies bore down on Aboriginal communities across the Northern Territory, Marralwanga established an outstation at Marrkolidjban, where he could teach his children how to properly care for ancestral lands, with part of that care involving a knowledge of how to paint. As a senior person who had travelled widely in his youth and gained extensive ceremonial knowledge, he was highly influential among a broad group of painters. His work entered the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, among others. A man of the Kardbam clan and Yirridjdja moiety, Marralwanga painted for Maningrida Arts and Culture from 1970 until his death in 1987. His most frequently recorded subjects are Ngalyod the Rainbow Serpent, Yawkyawk water spirits, Namarnkol the silver barramundi, and Kandakidj the antilopine kangaroo. Echidna c. 1979 is an unusual subject within that documented practice, the animal's spiny form offering particular opportunities for the intricate surface patterning in which Marralwanga excelled. Across the warm red-brown bark, the echidna's body fills the field as a great rounded form, its outline traced in fine white dot-work. The entire surface is resolved into dense diagonal rarrk in cream and warm ochre, so finely and evenly laid that it reads as texture before it reads as mark. At the lower edge, four pale legs emerge with their characteristic blunt claws, each rendered in spotted white pigment. Radiating spines break the outline at the upper right, drawn with the spare precision of an artist entirely at ease with his material.

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Sale 3 · Lot 7

Peter Marralwanga

c.1916 – 1987

Region: Arnhem Land
Community: Marrkolidjban
Language group: Kuninjku

Echidna, c. 1979

natural earth pigments on bark

49 x 57 cm

Est. $3,000 – $5,000

Hammer $5,500

Provenance: Lawson Menzies, Fine Aboriginal Art, Sydney, NSW, 22 November 2006, Lot 210 Private Collection, NSW, acquired from the above Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Lawson Menzies
Artwork story: Peter Marralwanga grew up in Western Arnhem Land surrounded by artists painting in rock shelters and learned to paint that way himself. The subjects of his paintings were the Djang, the ancestral beings who made his country and placed the spirits of people within it. As assimilation policies bore down on Aboriginal communities across the Northern Territory, Marralwanga established an outstation at Marrkolidjban, where he could teach his children how to properly care for ancestral lands, with part of that care involving a knowledge of how to paint. As a senior person who had travelled widely in his youth and gained extensive ceremonial knowledge, he was highly influential among a broad group of painters. His work entered the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, among others. A man of the Kardbam clan and Yirridjdja moiety, Marralwanga painted for Maningrida Arts and Culture from 1970 until his death in 1987. His most frequently recorded subjects are Ngalyod the Rainbow Serpent, Yawkyawk water spirits, Namarnkol the silver barramundi, and Kandakidj the antilopine kangaroo. Echidna c. 1979 is an unusual subject within that documented practice, the animal's spiny form offering particular opportunities for the intricate surface patterning in which Marralwanga excelled. Across the warm red-brown bark, the echidna's body fills the field as a great rounded form, its outline traced in fine white dot-work. The entire surface is resolved into dense diagonal rarrk in cream and warm ochre, so finely and evenly laid that it reads as texture before it reads as mark. At the lower edge, four pale legs emerge with their characteristic blunt claws, each rendered in spotted white pigment. Radiating spines break the outline at the upper right, drawn with the spare precision of an artist entirely at ease with his material.