As one of the last generation to remember a childhood lived in the desert hunting and gathering with her family, Walangkura Napanangka’s paintings recall the stories of country and the location of specific sites in her traditional homeland west of the salt lake of Karrkurutinjinya (Lake Macdonald). Born in 1946, at Tjitururrnga west of Kintore, in the remote and arid country between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, she lived with her father Rantji Tjapangati and mother Inyuwa Nampitjinpa and later, while still a teenager, travelled by foot with her family over the hundreds of kilometres from their remote desert home eventually joining Uta Uta Tjangala’s group as they walked into the settlements of Haasts Bluff and then Papunya. She passed in 2014 and her work have become significant examples of Pintupi women’s art.
Walangkura’s early works, created from 1996 onward, are characterized by masses of small markings and motifs covering large areas of canvas. Her favorite colour, a deep sandy orange predominates, accentuated against more somber blacks and reds and dusky greens or yellows. More recent works show a gestural quality though still tightly packed with an intensity of geometric line work representing sandhills. They are rich with a sense of rhythm and unimpeded movement: they show sandhills, rockholes, journeys and gatherings of ancestral women, the flow of colours in subtle shifts of light.
Walangkura’s work is highly collectable and has been widely exhibited and is included in a number of important private and public collections in both Australia and overseas.
COLLECTIONS:
Aboriginal Art Museum, The Netherlands
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Artbank
Gabrielle Pizzi Collection
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin
The Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles, USA
National Gallery of Australia
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
1997 - 2002 Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs 1998 'Sztuka Aborygenow' - (Art of the Aborigines), Warsaw, Poland
1999 Flinders Art Museum, Flinders University, Adelaide
2001 Pintupi, Alice Springs
2000 Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of NSW
2001 Dreamscapes - Contemporary Desert Art, Mostings Hus, Frederiksberg, Denmark
2003 Mythology and Reality, S.H Ervin Gallery, Sydney
2003 Solo Exhibition - Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
2004 Walangkura Napanangka, Utopia Art, Sydney
2005 Across Skin - Women Artists of the Western Desert, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle
2006 Papunya Tula Artists, Utopia Arts Sydney, Sydney
Luminaries of the Desert, Japinka Gallery, Perth
2008 Red Desert Gallery, Eumundi QLD