Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri

(circa 1926-1998)

Untitled (Rain Dreaming at Nyunmanu), 1994

Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Painted at Kintore, Northern Territory
Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory
Purchased from Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney in April 1994
The Laverty Collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED:
Spirit and Place: Art in Australia 1861 - 1996, curated by Nick Waterlow and Ross Mellick, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 21 November 1996 - 31 March 1997
The Laverty Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 20 June - 20 August 1998
12th Biennale of Sydney 2000, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 26 May - 30 July 2000
A Century of Collecting 1901>2001 curated by Nick Waterlow, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 29 March - 28 April 2001
Laverty 2, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle 14 May - 14 August 2011

LITERATURE:
Art & Australia, vol. 32, no. 1, Spring 1994, p.7 (illus.)
'The Laverty Collection' by Anne Loxley, Art and Australia, Spring 1996, vol. 34, no. 1, p.69 (illus.)
Ross Mellick and Nick Waterlow, Spirit and Place: Art in Australia 1861 - 1996, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996, p.62 (illus.)
Joan Kerr, 'Divining the Spiritual', Art & Australia, vol. 35, no. 1, 1997, p.53 (illus.)
John McDonald, 'Cull to be Kind', Sydney Morning Herald, 11 January 1997
John McDonald, 'Art and Authenticity', in Collections', the International Magazine of Art & Culture, 1998, vol. 3, no.1, p.63
Nick Waterlow, A Century of Collecting 1901>2001, Paddington, News South Wales: Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts, 2001, no. 29, p.16 (illus.)
Colin Laverty, 'Diversity and Strength: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art - A Private Collection', Arts of Asia, November - December 2003, cat. no. 13, p.87 (illus.)
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia's Remote Aboriginal Communities - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2008, p.80 (illus.)
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Australian Aboriginal Art - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Edition II, Melbourne: Kleimeyer Industries, 2011, pp.86-7 (illus.)

Mick Namarari was one of the founding members
of the men's painting group at Papunya in 1971
and his paintings were included in nearly all of the
consignments of paintings that were sent to the
Stuart Art Centre in Alice Springs. He was a versatile
artist, ready to experiment with a range of figuration
and compositional structures while retaining the
individuality of his 'hand'. His vast ancestral knowledge
and his ritual standing allowed Namarari to paint
a range of subjects that included the Wind, Water,
Kangaroo and Marsupial Mouse Dreamings. In 1978
he created a series of sublime paintings of the Moon
Dreaming for Mick and the Moon, Geoffrey Bardon's
film about the artist. A number of these paintings are
in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.
Namarari won the National Aboriginal Art Award in 1991
and in 1994 he was the first recipient of the Australia
Council's Red Ochre Award for his contribution
to Aboriginal culture at home and abroad.

His main source of inspiration was the Kangaroo
Dreaming at his place of birth, Marnpi. In the 1980s
Namarari left Papunya for the Pintupi community of
Walungurru (Kintore) from where he established an
outstation at Nyunmanu. Nyunmanu is a water soakage
at the site of the Dog Dreaming.

Untitled (Rain Dreaming at Nyunmanu), 1994, relates to a
number of paintings made by Namarari in the early
years of the Papunya movement, including Dingo puppies
(Ngunmanu), 1972, and Ngyuman, 1972, the latter in
the collection of the Flinders University Art Museum,
Adelaide (see Ryan, J, J. Kean et al, Tjukurrtjanu: Origins
of Western Desert art, Melbourne: National Gallery of
Victoria, 2011 pp.169 and 172 respectively. A later
related work is Untitled, 1997, in the collection of the
Art Gallery of New South Wales, illustrated in Perkins,
H. and H. Fink (eds), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius,
Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales in association
with Papunya Tula Artists, 2000, p.149.

Painted during the wet season of early 1994, Untitled
(Rain Dreaming at Nyunmanu), ranks as one of Namarari's
most accomplished paintings. His inventiveness is
evident in the use of continuous brush strokes as
opposed to the lines of joined dots favoured by most
Pintupi painters, that were to become a distinguishing
feature of his work from the late 1980s on. The hypnotic
minimalism of lateral lines combined with subtle shifts
in tonality lend this work a numinous quality that evokes
the natural rhythms of sand hills and water; more
significantly, the surface of the painting shimmers with
ancestral light.

In terms of Australian art history, Untitled (Rain Dreaming
at Nyunmanu), 1994, is a painting that crosses the cultural
divide that had hindered the aesthetic appreciation of
Aboriginal art on its own terms. In the ground-breaking
exhibition Spirit and Place: Art in Australia 1861-1996 at
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, curated by
Nick Waterlow and Ross Mellick in 1996–7, the painting
was hung in the final room of the exhibition beside
works by Maxie Tjampitjinpa, Rosalie Gascoigne, Brian
Blanchflower and other non-Indigenous artists. Such
juxtapositions of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art
were regarded at the time as 'a brave and important
gesture', to quote the art critic John McDonald ('Cull
to be Kind' in Spectrum Arts, Sydney Morning Herald,
11 January 1997, p.12) who went on to state that '...
surprisingly, no-one really loses by the comparison'.

Wally Caruana

This painting is sold with an accompanying Papunya Tula Artists certificate.