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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Jul 2015 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  2
• Lot Description:
  Gulumbu Yunupingu
  (1945-2012)
  Gan'yu (Stars) (2006)
  natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark
  153 x 75 cm
• Provenance:
  Buku Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Northern Territory; Alcastan Gallery, Melbourne; Private Collection, Melbourne
• Exhibited:
  Gulumbu Yunipingu: Bark paintings and Larrakitj (Hollow Logs), Alacaston Gallery, Sydney, 17 July - 28 July 2007; Power & Beauty: Indigenous Art Now, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 17 November 2007 - 10 March 2008
• Notes:
  This artwork is sold with a Buku-Larrnngay Mulka certificate which reads in part: "The first story is about two sisters call Guthayguthay and Nhayay. Guthayguthay is the elder sisters and sits at the biggest fire, she and Nhayay who is the younger sister and has a smaller fire. The elder sister is able to carry bigger fire wood than the younger sister who can only carry small fire wood. In the olden days these two sisters used to be people, but they turned into stars that sit in the sky under the Milky Way. When seasons here are hot the two sisters are arguing and sitting apart from each other with different fires. These arguments are often over a man called Marrngu. When the seasons are cooler the two sisters are seen together sitting by one big fire. They are surrounded by more stars when they are sitting together. When you look in the sky long enough you will see two women figures sitting near two bright stars, which are the fires burning." Gulumbu Yunupingu inherited the right to paint the Yolngu constellations from her father, the renowned Gumatj artist and cultural leader, Munggurrawuy Yunupingu (c.1907-1979) who also taught her to paint on bark. Whereas Munggurrawuy depicted the creation of the firmament in a combination of traditional figurative and symbolic imagery and miny'tji sacred clan patterns, his daughter has constructed her paintings on variations of the star motif, commencing with a series of sixty small bark paintings that were shown at the World Expo in Hanover, Germany, in 2000. From that time on, Gulumbu sought to capture the atmospheric sensation of the sky at night as seen from north east Arnhem Land. A measure of her talent is her ability to create a shimmering painted surface that is reflective of ancestral presences that corresponds with that Yolngu artists achieve through the use of fine patterns of miny'tji. The constellations to which Gulumbu's paintings refer are two: that of the sisters Gudhaykudhay and Nhayay who transformed into two stars that can be seen below the Milky Way; and the Seven Sisters (the Pleiades) who journeyed across the firmament in djulpan, their canoe, and who were followed by three brothers (Orion). Gulumbu perceived the constellations as uniting peoples from all cultures and societies across the world. Gulumbu Yunupingu rose to prominence as an artist in her mid-fifties and she is represented in several major public and private collections in Australia and abroad. Gulumbu won the prestigious Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2004; she was commissioned to create a ceiling piece for the MusŽe du quai Branly, Paris, which opened in 2006, and public sculpture work for the Hedley Bull Centre for World Politics at the Australian National University, Canberra, in 2008; she was selected for the first National Indigenous Art Triennial, Culture Warriors, at the National Gallery of Australia in 2007; and she featured in Marking Time, the reopening exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in the year of her passing. Wally Caruana
• Estimate:
  A$18,000 - 25,000
• 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.