Yukultji Napangati
AUSTRALIAN. PINTUPI, B. CIRCA 1970
For more than twenty years, Napangati has created gorgeous, shimmering paintings which evoke the vast Western Desert where she was born. Minimalist in palette and formally abstract, her epic paintings draw on ancestral myths that were passed down to the artist from her mother and her mother’s mother – their “Dreamings”. These narratives told again and again, are symbolically embedded in the architecture of the interconnected lines and dots that cover the picture plane. Her paintings feel sequential, as if one begets another, yet each holds a dynamism and rigor all to its own.
In these works, nature is transposed into sinuous, undulating lines, sometimes interrupted by amoeba-like forms which alter the rhythmic totality of the composition. These interruptions create fissures–each represent a new storyline. Even in her more minimalist, linear compositions, Napangati’s mark-making wavers between small tight strokes and slightly looser indentations, which create the extraordinary impression that the paintings are breathing.
The country that Napangati paints is the remote Gibson Desert in Western Australia, north of Kiwirrkurra near the great salt lake Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay), the heart of the Pintupi homelands. One important site is Marrapinti where a large group of ancestral women camped at a rock hole and performed ceremonial activities before continuing their travels east. Napangati was born at this site and lived nomadically with her small family of nine until the age of fourteen, when they were sighted and subsequently reunited with her Pintupi kin. Making national headlines as the last of the desert nomads, “The Lost Tribe” (or “Pintupi Nine”) generated a media sensation when they were discovered in October 1984 living independently and without contact to the outside world. But despite the attention, they insisted that they were not lost, merely living off the land as their ancestors had for millennia.
Yukultji Napangati began to paint in 1996, as part of a burgeoning initiative amongst Pintupi women to create work independently of their male relatives. It had been nearly 25 years since the founding of Papunya Tula Artists, the community art center established in 1972 that heralded the birth of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement in Australia. During those first two decades, there were only “painting men”, although women sometimes assisted their husbands or other close male relatives with a painting’s background. Women began to paint collaboratively, and then on their own, bringing confidence, skill and a renewed energy into Western Desert painting. Most importantly, they found a unique and powerful means to express and preserve their cultural inheritance, and in so doing, develop an aesthetic language all of their own.
COLLECTIONS
National Gallery of Australia Art Gallery of New South Wales
Australia Artbank
Griffith University Art Collection
National Gallery of Victoria
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA
Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Toledo Musuem of Art, Toledo, Ohio, USA
Queensland Gallery Of Modern Art, Australia
AWARDS
2018 Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
2013 Highly Commended, Wynne Landscape Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
2012 The Alice Prize, Araluen Art Centre, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia
2011 Highly Commended, Wynne Landscape Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia