UMBER is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition, ‘Patterns In Nature’, featuring artists of the famous Pintupi Nine mob, Yukultji Napangati, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Yalti Napangati, Thomas Tjapaltjarri & Walala Tjapaltjarri. These individuals are amongst a small cohort of globally celebrated Aboriginal painters from the Central and Western Desert Movement.
Over the past decade, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri & Yukultji Napangati’s work in particular has been showcased by some of the world’s largest and most influential platforms for contemporary art. Both artists have exhibited works in solo and group exhibitions with influential galleries such as New York’s Salon 94 & Gagosian Gallery - the world’s best performing commercial art gallery, with 16 global locations. Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri has received media attention from the likes of The New York Times & The Wall Street Journal, maintaining the highest auction record for a living Aboriginal artist.
Not only united through their creative talents; each of the named artists are also intrinsically linked through a shared past. These individuals were once part of a small mob of nine Aboriginal Pintupi people, who walked out of their traditional nomadic existence - and 50,000 years of uninterrupted cultural tradition - into the newly established community of Kiwirrkura in the Northern Gibson Desert of Western Australia in 1984. The nine were hailed in the international press as the ‘Last Nomads’, and had never encountered white people at close proximity before. Today, they are documented in history as the last known group of First Nations peoples to have left their orthodox traditional ways at the crossroads of a Western world.
Contrary to the dominating media narrative, members of the Pintupi Nine did not so hastily abandon their traditional ways. Each of the artists’ works demonstrate a profoundly spiritual connection to Country and a symbiotic respect for the land. As members of the Pintupi Nine, the artists’ unmatched familiarity with pure and undisturbed cultural traditions, is perhaps the determining quality underpinning their success as some of the greatest living exponents of contemporary Desert painting.
In ‘Patterns In Nature’, each artwork reflects this closeness to Country; particularly through deliberate and repeated mark-making, mirroring not only the natural patterns of the desert, but the shared social and knowledge networks echoed through Tjurkurrpa (The Dreaming). While Yalti and Yukultji commonly paint women’s law and their mother’s country of Marrapinti, Warlimpirrnga, Thomas & Walala immortalise the secret and sacred Tingari cycle, each painting the stories in a distinct visual language that has garnered international praise. The artists have adapted to painting Country in symbolic patterns, reoccurring lines and grids, but with a movement and vitality that is frankly unmatched. Their knowledge of the land and its natural features transforms their art to a calibre that can not be replicated.
