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

LOT 54

TOMMY (YANNIMA) WATSON (C.1935 – 2017)

Untitled, 2014
synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen
121 x 91 cm

PROVENANCE
Palya Proper Fine Art, NT
Cooee Art Gallery, Bondi Beach, Cat No. 13660

EST $10,000 - $15,000

Pitjantjatjara elder Tommy Watson is revered as one of the foremost colourists of the Western Desert movement. His paintings channel tjukurrpa (Dreaming) into luminous, gestural meditations on Country and ceremony. This 2014 work, painted at Wanarn, radiates with reds, purples, and incandescent whites that trace ancestral pathways across the desert.

Watson’s paintings are instinctive, personal, and profoundly spiritual. They demonstrate the rare combination of cultural gravity and painterly brilliance. The present work comes from the mature period of Watson’s career, when his chromatic language was at its boldest. It is a commanding example of his legacy: a bridge between ancestral law and contemporary abstraction, radiant with both memory and invention.