Wimmitji Tjapangarti

(circa 1925-2000)

Artist's Country, 1990

Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Warlayirti Artists, Wirrimanu (Balgo Hills), Western Australia
Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne
Purchased from Sotheby's, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 29 June 1998, lot 209
The Laverty Collection, Sydney

LITERATURE:
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.114 (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, p.126 (illus.)

This painting is sold with accompanying Warlayirti Artists documentation.

WIMMITJI TJAPANGARTI
Wimmitji Tjapangarti was the major figure in the first
group of artists at Balgo to paint for a public market.
He grew up on his traditional lands around Lirrwarti,
south of Balgo. He went To Balgo in the late 1940s to
settle once the rest of his extended family had gone to
live on the mission. After 1958 he recorded ancestral
narratives and ceremonies for the eminent Australian
anthropologist Ronald and Catherine Berndt. As a
maparn or traditional healer, Wimmitji also assisted
Father Anthony Peile with his studies of Aboriginal
concepts of healing and the human body, and Wimmitji
helped Peile to compile a Kukatja dictionary. Wimmitji
was among a group of men who initiated the modern
painting movement at Balgo in 1981-2. He was
represented in the exhibition Art from the Great Sandy Desert
at the Art Gallery of Western Australia that brought
the artists of Balgo to the attention of the Australian art
world. The exhibition was mounted in conjunction with
the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt.

After the local art centre, Warlyirti Arts, was established
in 1987, Wimmitji and Eubena Nampitjin, whom he
had married some years previously, painted together at
their home camp, and on several occasions collaborated
on the same painting to the point where Wimmitji's
distinctive processes of painting had an influence on
his wife's work. He developed an intricate style of
painting that incorporated various methods of paint
application, complex dot patterns and compositions,
and highly tactile paint surfaces. Wimmitji's paintings
are marked by a sense of bravura, of energy reflective
of the ancestral force that is the underlying subject
of his work. Wimmitji ceased painting in 1993 as his
eyesight deteriorated. He is represented in several major
exhibitions in Australia and abroad, including Images
of Power: Aboriginal art of the Kimberley at the National
Gallery of Victoria in 1993; ARATJARA, Art of the First
Australians, at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen,
Dusseldorf, the Hayward Gallery, London, and the
Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, in 1993–94;
Stories: Eleven Aboriginal Artists, Works from The Holmes à
Court Collection at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover,
Germany, in 1995; and Ancestral Modern: Australian
Aboriginal Art: Kaplan & Levi Collection, at the Seattle Art
Museum, USA.

Wally Caruana