Sunfly Tjampitjin

(circa 1916-1996)

Men's Law at Artist's Country at Murunpa, 1991

Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Warlayirti Artists, Wirrimanu (Balgo Hills), Western Australia
Purchased from Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne in July 1992

EXHIBITED:
The View from Balgo Hills - an exhibition of paintings by Senior Law men and women, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 25 March - 25 April 1992, cat. no. 6
Aratjara, Art of the First Australians, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany, 24 April - 4 July 1993, Hayward Gallery, London, England, UK, 23 July - 10 October 1993; Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, 11 February - 23 May 1994; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 23 June - 15 August 1994
The Laverty Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 20 June - 23 August 1998
Ngurra Kutu: Going Home, Yiribana Gallery at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, September 2001 - June 2002

LITERATURE:
Bernard Luthi et al., Aratjara: art of the first Australians: traditional and contemporary works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, exh. cat., Koln: DuMont, 1993, cat. no. 118, p.272 (illus.)
Terry Ingram, 'Germany taps into Aboriginal Art', Australian Financial Review, 29 April 1993
Ville & Casali, (Italian magazine) July/August 1993
Neville Weston, 'London loves first Aussies', The West Australian, Arts Today, p.6, 24 September 1993 (illus.)
Art and Australia, Autumn 1994, vol. 31, no. 3, p.323 (illus.)
John McDonald, 'Art and Authenticity', Collections, the International Magazine of Art and Culture, 1998, vol. 3, no. 1, p.62
The Laverty Collection, in MCA Now guide book, Winter 1998, June/July/August, p.5 (illus.)
Jeremy Eccles, 'The Pleasure Principle',State of the Arts, August - November 1998, p.78 (illus.)
James Cowan, Balgo: New Directions, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999, pl.26, p.82 (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.133 (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.148 (illus.)

Balgo in the Tanami Desert is at the crossroads of
several major Dreaming tracks that link the Western
Desert and the Kimberley. Its significance as a religious
place was multiplied when a Catholic Pallottine Mission
was established in 1939. Sunfly (Sandfly) Tjampitjin
was a senior Kukatja law man in the community with
the ritual stature to paint about the most highly-charged
religious subjects such as the Tingari ancestors and their
revelatory acts. His paintings are characterised by bold
iconic forms that have a sense of the monumental in
scale, even thought the dimensions of the support may
be modest. These forms dominate the picture plane
and convey notions of certainty, clarity of thought
and authoritativeness. Men's Law at artist's country at
Murunpa, 1991, shows two young initiates (the inverted
and joined U-forms at the centre) camped near a large
sand hill surrounded by hills, rocky outcrops and water
soakages. The painting possesses an autobiographical
dimension in that Murunpa, in the Alec Ross Range
at the northern tip of Lake Mackay, is Tjampitjin's
conception site and where in the latter years of his life
he established an outstation.

Sunfly Tjampitjin participated in the first ever
exhibition of Balgo art at the Shinju Matsuri Festival,
Broome in 1981. In 1986, he featured prominently in
the groundbreaking exhibition Art from the Great Sandy
Desert at the Art Gallery of Western Australia which
put the artists of Balgo on the map of Australian art.
The exhibition was mounted in conjunction with the
anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt who had
been conducting fieldwork at Balgo since 1958. Sunfly
has been represented in several major international
exhibitions including L'été australien à Montpellier: 100 chefsd'oeuvre
de la peinture australienne, Musée Fabre, Montpellier,
France, in 1990; Aboriginal Paintings from the Desert, Union
of Soviet Artists Gallery, Moscow, and Museum of
Ethnographic Art, St. Petersburg, in 1991; Crossroads-
Towards a New Reality, Aboriginal Art from Australia, National
Museums of Modern Art, Kyoto and Tokyo, in
1992; and ARATJARA, Art of the First Australians, at the
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, the
Hayward Gallery, London, and the Louisiana Museum,
Humlebaek, Denmark, in 1993-4.

Wally Caruana

This painting is sold with accompanying Warlayirti Artists documentation.