Willy Tjungurrayi Pintupi, 1932-2018

Willy Tjungurrayi is one of the most sought after Western Desert Painters, praised for his immersive portrayals of the sacred and secret Tingari cycle. His ancestry and communal position endowed him with a unique and intimate knowledge of these traditions, and as a result, Tjungurrayi has translated those masterfully within his own work. Tjungurrayi has been acknowledged as one of the greatest colourists of Aboriginal desert painting.

Tjungurrayi was born in 1930, at Patjantja, south west of Lake MacDonald in Queensland. Tjungurrayi moved to Papunya from his birthplace, in his late 30’s. Throughout the 70’s, he moved through various Western Desert communities, finally settling in Kintore where he lived from the early 1980’s until 2003.

 

Tjungurrayi is the brother of prominent artists Yala Yala and George Ward. Dominating his works throughout much of the 1980’s and 1990’s, are delicatly painted cPintupi grids of interconnecting rondels and Dreaming tracks. These early to mid career paintings embody a vibrancy and dynamism that expands the bounds of painterly form. Tjungurrayi's other early paintings depict the sites where large groups of men gathered in the formative period establishing the song cycles, ritual procedures and ceremonies that are considered secret and sacred amongst Pintupi men to this day.

 

During the mid 1990’s, after having been exposed to Western culture for some time, Tjungurrayi began creating paintings that married individual artistic expression with ceremonial visual traditions. He, is often cited as an artist whose more recent works are somewhat abstractions, by which the meanings can differ from tradition or simply do not relate. This is especially true of the seemingly abstracted duo-chrome works, overlayed with delicate colour transitions and ultimately creating an hypnotic rhythm across the canvas. Though these works still make reference to the Tingari ancestors travels over vast stretches of country, the symbolism is far less tangible than in his earlier works.

 

Willy Tjungurray is a prime example of an artist who learns from, and expands upon his ancestral history, in order to achieve unparralelled artistic expression.