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.

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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