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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Art
• Sale Date:
  22 Jul 2014 ~ 6.30pm (Part 1 - Lots 1 - 198)
  23 Jul 2014 ~ 2.30pm (Part 2 - Lots 199 - 331)
• Lot #:
  55
• Lot Description:
  Uta Uta (Tjangala)
  (circa 1926-1990)
  Big Corroboree with Water Dreaming Tjuringas (1972)
  synthetic polymer paint on board
  66 x 63 cm
• Provenance:
  Painted at Papunya, Northern Territory; Stuart Art Centre, Alice Springs (19089); Private Collection; Fine Tribal Art and Aboriginal Paintings, Sotheby's Australia, Sydney, 3 December 1994, lot 612; Museum Art International, Adelaide (94004); John W. Kluge, United States of America
• References:
  Aboriginal Art from the Collection of John W. Kluge, Mossgreen Auctions, Melbourne, 6 June 2012, lot 15, illustrated; Private Collection, Melbourne
• Notes:
  From the Morven Estate Curatorial Services records: The ground pattern for the Corroboree is laid out with a concentric circle and the Family Dreaming Tjurungas and the Water Dreaming motif. The tracks of the Corroboree Dancer are indicated in the top right hand corner of the painting. Uta Uta Tjangala made a powerful impression on everybody he met. Geoff Bardon describes 'Uta Uta as a warrior and charismatic, an exciting man handling spears and 'woomera' for my camera, demonstrating in private his prowess with traditional artefacts.'1Uta Uta was also adept with ceremonial protocol and performance. He was the first of the western Pintupi to take up the brush, and he painted with undiminished passion until his death in 1990.2 Uta Uta also made an indelible impression on the anthropologist Fred Myers, who explains that as the Painting movement emerged in the early 1970s, 'Shorty Lungkata [an equally magnetic Pintupi man] and Uta Uta were elders at the height of their influence and knowledge, free to decide when to proffer knowledge and insight, and to whom. Their play with exposure and revelation is almost excessive in comparison [to younger artists]... Often, in the early work of these older men, one sees a figure - the dancer, the ancestor - as a sign perhaps of what the artists are thinking as they depict their stories. Yet even in the geometric simplicity of the circle and the line, the movements of dance and body - of movement - inform the imagery. It is almost as if Shorty Lungkata and Uta Uta inhabit their paintings...'3 While Big Corroboree with Water Dreaming Tjuringas exemplifies Myers' observations, its subject matter is exceptional within Uta Uta's oeuvre. Moreover, the painting was produced as Uta Uta's passion for ceremony was matched by a considered approach to composition. The Water Dreaming ceremony envisaged by the artist is very likely to be linked to Kalipinypa, (the site associated with the paintings of Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula). Uta Uta, as a man of the Tjangala subsection, had custodial responsibilities for Water Dreaming. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Uta Uta's countryman and classificatory son, occasionally depicts the ancestral events at Kalipinypa. It is very probable that Big Corroboree with Water Dreaming Tjuringas was painted in 1972, for it exhibits strong compositional similarities with Kaapa Tjampitjinpa's Budgerigar Dreaming series (ten or more related works painted in succession) painted during the winter months.4 Kaapa was then acknowledged as the leader of the painters, who had already experienced considerable success flowing from his pictorial inventions and masterful technique. Kaapa was an influential figure in the painting room that attracted men from diverse tribal backgrounds to work together in a common atelier.5 A comparison between the schematic outlines of Big Corroboree with Water Dreaming Tjuringas and Kaapa's Budgerigar Dreaming, (Sotheby's June 2012, p39) reveal that the artists had comparable pictorial intentions, at least while creating these particular works. Both paintings use the picture plane as analogies for the kanala (ceremonial ground) upon which tulku (sacred objects) are distributed, just as would be the case in ceremony. The tulku are stacked, bound, one on another and lined-up in relationship to the focal point of the ceremony, (which in Uta Uta's painting is represented by the roundel). The objects in Kaapa's Budgerigar Dreaming are compressed and attenuated to conform to an idealized, symmetrical structure rigorously governed by the rectangular format. In contrast Uta Uta's forms jostle for space with dance-like dynamism. Uta Uta's composition is further energized by the tracks of the principal performer moving around the ceremonial ground. Uta Uta would later be instrumental within a select group of Pintupi artists in defining a new approach to painting based on the body paint of performers in the Tingari ceremonies. As a consequence, Uta Uta's paintings, and those of his Pintupi peers, would diverge stylistically from those works by Kaapa and his fellow Anmatyerr artists. Big Rain Corroboree is a wonderful testament to the fragile fusion of cultural concepts that occurred in the men's painting room, as men from diverse backgrounds fired-off each other's creativity for a brief but triumphal period. John Kean 1 Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya: A Place Made after the Story:The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2004, p.69 2 ibid 3 Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Duke University Press, Durham, 2002, pp. 111-115 4 Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, 2004, p. 277-81 5 Vivien Johnson, Once upon a time in Papunya, A New South Book, Sydney, 2010, pp. 44-78
• Estimate:
  A$50,000 - 70,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.