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

LOT 3

TIM LEURA TJAPALTJARRI (1930 - 1984)

Emu Travelling Dreaming, 1972
powder pigment on composition board
30 x 50 cm

PROVENANCE
Stuart Art Centre, Alice Springs, Cat No. 5013 (Geoff Bardon)
Post-modern Primitive, New York (David Betz)

EST $30,000 - $40,000

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri was among the most innovative and conceptually ambitious of the first generation Papunya painters. Half-brother to Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, he is credited with extending the visual lexicon of Papunya beyond formal dotting into highly structured, often experimental designs that fused ancestral narrative with modernist abstraction.

This early board traces the movements of emu ancestors across Country through concentric roundels, inflected pathways, and dotted infill, with the distinctive red arrow motifs marking the tracks of the bird. Such boards, produced in the initial years of Papunya Tula, represent both sacred cartographies and the radical birth of a new art form that would transform Australian art history. Tim Leura’s work is held in all major state collections and the National Gallery of Australia, with early boards of this calibre remaining exceptionally rare in private hands.