Walangkura Napanangka Indigenous Australian, 1940-2014

Walangkura Napanangka (ca. 1946-2014, Pintupi) was among the most prominent Kintori artists. From the 1980s, she began participating in collaborative projects with other women, who aimed to reaffirm their connection to the land through painting, singing, and dancing, and to pass their knowledge, traditions, and rituals to the new generations. Becoming a member of the Papunya Tula in the mid-1990s, the artist began holding solo exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney, and had her works included in important group surveys at the MAGNT in Darwin; Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw; Galerie Bahr in Speyer, Germany; Heide MoMA; Stadtgalerie Bamberg at Villa Dessauer, Germany; and numerous others. A regular finalist in the NAATSIAA and other prizes, the artist had won the Redlands Westpac Art Prize in 2005. Walangkura Napanangka’s works have been acquired by numerous state, regional, and tertiary collections across Australia, the Artbank, the Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht, as well as prominent corporate and private art collections in Australia and abroad.

As pointed out by Kate Owen, “Walangkura's works are characterized by masses of small markings and motifs covering large areas of canvas. Her favourite colour, a deep sandy orange, predominates, accentuated against more sombre 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. In a sense this provides a strong visual and contextual link to the men's linear style as exemplified by the works of George Tjungurrayi, Turkey Tolson and Willy Tjungurrayi. 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. Many of these are monumental works that transmit the confidence of an assured and dynamic creativity. Walangkura transmits the power of the desert, soaked up during her childhood years, and imbues her works with the mystery of a sacred perception.”