AUCTION | The Terence J. Gilbert Collection | 30 October 2025

LOT 2

TOBY BROWN TJAMPITJINPA (c.1920 - 1986)

Sugar Bag or Corkwood Nectar Dreaming, Papunya, c.1972
powder pigment on composition board
57 x 43 cm

PROVENANCE
Sotheby’s Australia, Important Aboriginal Art Auction, Sydney, 18 June 1995, Lot 368

EST $20,000 - $30,000

Toby Brown Tjampitjinpa was among the early Papunya painters whose works articulate the visual lexicon of the emerging desert painting movement in the early 1970s. His paintings often drew upon the Sugar Bag Dreaming and associated Corkwood Nectar stories, mapping sources of sustenance and ancestral presence across Country.

This work, executed circa 1972, is characteristic of the experimental years at Papunya, when artists translated sand and body designs into enduring board compositions under the encouragement of Geoffrey Bardon. The concentric roundels and flowing bands here refer to the locations of sugar bag hives and the movement of ancestral bees. The field of dotted infill situates the design within the Papunya idiom, while the bold red brown ochre and black provides the work with an intensity that foreshadowed the desert movement’s international impact.