Patrick Tjungurrayi | 'Tingari, 2009' | 30x120cm

Code: PPFA2021776

Artist: Patrick Tjungurrayi

Title: Tingari

Area: Kiwirrkurra and Balgo (Wirrimanu), WA

Community: Pintupi / Kukatja

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 30x120cm

Year: 2009

The Tingari Cycle is the great narrative underpinning Pintupi ceremonial life, telling of ancestral beings who travelled with their wives and young initiates across the Western Desert, performing ceremonies and shaping the land as they went — carving out rockholes, soakages and sacred sites, and laying down the law that still governs Pintupi society. Only senior initiated men hold the right to paint its full meaning, and Patrick Tjungurrayi, a Law man with country spanning Balgo, Kiwirrkurra and Kintore, was among its most authoritative custodians. His paintings render these ancestral journeys as geometric structures: concentric forms marking sites, joined by long travelling lines.

Patrick Tjungurrayi was one of the most authoritative painters of the Western Desert, a senior Law man whose country lay between Balgo, Kiwirrkurra and Kintore. Born in the desert west of the Canning Stock Route around 1935, he grew up living traditionally and walked north out of the desert in the late 1950s, settling for many years at Balgo before returning to live near his traditional country at Kiwirrkurra. He began painting in the mid-1980s with Warlayirti Artists at Balgo, and from the 1990s painted for Papunya Tula Artists, an unusual dual association that gave his work an equally unusual range. His early paintings are dense, saturated and pigment-heavy; from the late 1990s he pared them back to spare, powerful linear structures, reintroducing colour after the flooding of Kiwirrkurra in 2000. The subject throughout is the Tingari Cycle and the ancestral sites of his country, handled with a monumentality that has made his canvases among the most sought-after of the later Pintupi generation. Beyond painting, Tjungurrayi was a determined advocate for remote renal care, leading the collaborative Kiwirrkurra Men's Painting whose sale funded dialysis services.