Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi

(circa 1925-1998)

Untitled (Tingari Men's Campsite at Patantja, South West of Lake MacDonald: Kuningka and Snake Dreaming), 1988

Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Painted at Kiwirrkura, Western Australia
Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory
Purchased from Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne in May 1989
The Laverty Collection, Sydney

YALA YALA GIBBS TJUNGURRAYI
Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi was a Pintupi man of
high ritual authority who was among the first group
of men to take up painting at Papunya in 1971. He
was an avid and intense painter, totally absorbed in his
work and, as befits a ceremonial songman, he would
often sing verses from a Dreaming as he painted it.
His early paintings on board are characterised by a
strong graphic sense as he developed forms in bold
contrasting colours of black, white and red. Yala Yala
was also one of the chief exponents of the circle and
line matrix associated with sacred–secret Tingari
subjects that influenced many Pintupi painters through
the 1980s. During this period several of his paintings
featured large water snakes at Kaakuratintja (Lake
MacDonald) where they are said to live in the lake.

Yala Yala Gibbs has been represented in several major
exhibitions in Australia and abroad, including: The
Inspired Dream, Life as art in Aboriginal Australia, at the
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
and touring internationally in 1988; Papunya Tula:
Genesis and Genius, at the Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney in 2000; Papunya Painting - Out of the
desert, at the National Museum of Australia in 2007;
Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya,
at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell
University, Ithaca, Fowler Museum of Cultural History,
University of Californa, Los Angeles, and the Grey
Art Gallery at New York University, New York, in
2009; and Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert art, at
the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in 2011
and at the Musée du quai Branly in 2012. In 1988,
following the Dreamings exhibition in New York, the
Brooklyn Museum of Art acquired one of Yala Yala's
paintings.

Wally Caruana

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