Water Dreaming, 2004

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

190 x 300 cm

Est. $8,000 – $12,000

Hammer $8,000

Provenance: Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime Gallery, Alice Springs, NT Private Collection, NT Accompanied by a photograph of the artist creating the work
Artwork story: Kalipinypa is a Water Dreaming site in Pintupi country and the place where Tjampitjinpa's grandfather died. It is among the most personal and significant subjects in his practice, and at 190 x 300 cm this 2004 canvas gives it the scale it demands. From the mid-1990s, as the Art Gallery of New South Wales noted in the Catalogue for his 2015 survey exhibition of a forty-year career, Tjampitjinpa began producing works of maze-like line work that he progressively intensified — the intricate key design characteristic of incised objects from the region morphed into a mesmerising web of compositional complexity that expands and contracts across the canvas. This Water Dreaming is exactly that: sweeping arcs of tightly packed parallel lines moving in continuous lateral rhythm across the full width of the canvas, a near-monochromatic field in which country is rendered not as image but as force. In 2004, the year this canvas was made, Tjampitjinpa was elected Chairman of Papunya Tula Artists.

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Sale 3 · Lot 78

c.1943 – 2023

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

190 x 300 cm

Est. $8,000 – $12,000

Hammer $8,000

Provenance: Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime Gallery, Alice Springs, NT Private Collection, NT Accompanied by a photograph of the artist creating the work
Artwork story: Kalipinypa is a Water Dreaming site in Pintupi country and the place where Tjampitjinpa's grandfather died. It is among the most personal and significant subjects in his practice, and at 190 x 300 cm this 2004 canvas gives it the scale it demands. From the mid-1990s, as the Art Gallery of New South Wales noted in the Catalogue for his 2015 survey exhibition of a forty-year career, Tjampitjinpa began producing works of maze-like line work that he progressively intensified — the intricate key design characteristic of incised objects from the region morphed into a mesmerising web of compositional complexity that expands and contracts across the canvas. This Water Dreaming is exactly that: sweeping arcs of tightly packed parallel lines moving in continuous lateral rhythm across the full width of the canvas, a near-monochromatic field in which country is rendered not as image but as force. In 2004, the year this canvas was made, Tjampitjinpa was elected Chairman of Papunya Tula Artists.