Kutata, 1976

synthetic polymer paint on canvas board

71 x 56 cm

Est. $2,500 – $4,500

Hammer $4,800

Provenance: Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, Alice Springs, NT, Cat No. CE 76450 Lawsons, Monthly Fine Art & Antiques, Sydney, NSW, 25 July 2008, Lot 2166 Private Collection, Vic, acquired from the above Accompanied by an original certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd
Artwork story: The Papunya Tula certificate for Kutata is dated April 1976 and signed by Janet Wilson, one of the succession of coordinators who kept the young company's work in the marketplace through its first decade. It records the site — approximately 400 kilometres west-north-west of Alice Springs — as Country of deep personal significance to the artist. The mythological story running through it was paralleled by the lives of the Ngangala sub-section sisters, Tjapaltjarri's father's wives, who foraged this same landscape; his own family similarly lived and foraged there, the mythological past linking directly with the present in his mind's eye. That continuity is visible in the work. Three concentric circles mark the waterholes from which the ancestral women set out each morning, the yellow dots recording the solanum and other desert fruits gathered, the white dots the witchetty grubs dug from the earth, the deep red ground the sand turned over in their labour. The paired half-circles represent the women themselves (although there are four half-circles at each waterhole), a form derived from the impression of a seated body in sand, the elongated bars their digging sticks and the oval forms their coolamons. Born at Pikilyi (Vaughan Springs) north-west of Mount Liebig, Tjapaltjarri worked fourteen years as a stockman before arriving at Papunya with his wife Nora Nakamarra in the community's earliest days. He began painting around 1972 under the guidance of Billy Stockman, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, and Johnny Warangkula. Jennifer Isaacs AM, in her epilogue to Bardon's foundational account of the movement, named him among those quietly significant painters the market overlooked — a beautiful painter, in her words, whose contribution the record is only now beginning to properly measure.

Catalogues242 of 257

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Sale 3 · Lot 94

Charlie Egalie Jabaldjari (Tjapaltjarri)

c.1924–1940 – 2002

Region: Western Desert
Community: Papunya
Language group: Luritja; Warlpiri

Kutata, 1976

synthetic polymer paint on canvas board

71 x 56 cm

Est. $2,500 – $4,500

Hammer $4,800

Provenance: Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, Alice Springs, NT, Cat No. CE 76450 Lawsons, Monthly Fine Art & Antiques, Sydney, NSW, 25 July 2008, Lot 2166 Private Collection, Vic, acquired from the above Accompanied by an original certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd
Artwork story: The Papunya Tula certificate for Kutata is dated April 1976 and signed by Janet Wilson, one of the succession of coordinators who kept the young company's work in the marketplace through its first decade. It records the site — approximately 400 kilometres west-north-west of Alice Springs — as Country of deep personal significance to the artist. The mythological story running through it was paralleled by the lives of the Ngangala sub-section sisters, Tjapaltjarri's father's wives, who foraged this same landscape; his own family similarly lived and foraged there, the mythological past linking directly with the present in his mind's eye. That continuity is visible in the work. Three concentric circles mark the waterholes from which the ancestral women set out each morning, the yellow dots recording the solanum and other desert fruits gathered, the white dots the witchetty grubs dug from the earth, the deep red ground the sand turned over in their labour. The paired half-circles represent the women themselves (although there are four half-circles at each waterhole), a form derived from the impression of a seated body in sand, the elongated bars their digging sticks and the oval forms their coolamons. Born at Pikilyi (Vaughan Springs) north-west of Mount Liebig, Tjapaltjarri worked fourteen years as a stockman before arriving at Papunya with his wife Nora Nakamarra in the community's earliest days. He began painting around 1972 under the guidance of Billy Stockman, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, and Johnny Warangkula. Jennifer Isaacs AM, in her epilogue to Bardon's foundational account of the movement, named him among those quietly significant painters the market overlooked — a beautiful painter, in her words, whose contribution the record is only now beginning to properly measure.