Untitled ,
2002
synthetic polymer paint on linen
153.0 x 122.0 cm
numbered with Papunya Tula Artists number ‘NN0208142’ (on the reverse)
Provenance
Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, Alice Springs
Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne
Australian Aboriginal Art, Christie’s Australia, Melbourne, 30 August 2005, lot.38
Acquired from the above
Exhibited
Utopia Art Sydney at ACAF2002, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, October 2002
Naata Nungurrayi was a Pintupi woman who became one of the leading artists of her generation painting with Papunya Tula.
Born around 1932 at Kumil near the Pollock Hills, Gibson Desert, she first arrived at Papunya in April 1964, ‘coming in’ to the community during a particularly severe drought that affected her family’s traditional, nomadic life. She moved to Kaltukatjara (Docker River) in the 1970s and Walungurru (Kintore) in the 1980s, but it was only in 1994 that she began painting with the Kintore-Haasts Bluff collaborative. She joined Papunya Tula Artists shortly after in 1996.
From a family of established artists, Naata's brother is George Tjungurrayi, her sister is the late Nancy Nungurrayi and her son is Kenny Williams Tjampitjinpa.
This untitled painting from 2002 was painted by Nungurrayi at the height of her career, during which time she had consolidated what curator Luke Scholes has described as a ‘unique iconography teeming with giant ‘U’ shapes, mollusc-like forms depicting rocky outcrops and deep-etched lines representing the endless surrounding sandhills.’[1] At the centre is a field of rockhole and soakage sites – traditional rest and ceremonial sites, and areas for foraging. The location of this work is not named, but Nungurrayi often painted her country around Pollock Hills, including what she thought of as her ‘home’ at the soakage site of Marrapinti, where both men and women had their septums pierced with bones as part of traditional ceremonies.
The same year as this painting was made, Nungurrayi’s painting Women at Marrapinti was Highly Commended at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs), and she was a finalist in the NATSIAAs a further five times. In 2021, she was included in Papunya Tula: 50 Years 1971-2021, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney; and in 2019, her work was included in Desert Painters of Australia, Gagosian, New York, USA, which included works from the Kluge-Ruhe Collection and from the Steve Martin and Anne Springfield Collections.
Nungurrayi’s work is represented in major Australian public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Her work is well represented in major international collections, including the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, USA, and the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, University of Virginia, USA.
Naata died in 2021
[1] Luke Scholes, ‘Naata Nungurrayi from Kintore (Walungurru), Beyond Sacred: Australian Aboriginal Art – The collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Kleimeyer Industries, Melbourne, 2011, 2nd ed., p. 58.
