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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Jul 2015 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  13
• Lot Description:
  Eubena (Nampitjin)
  (1921-2013)
  Nyilla (2005)
  synthetic polymer paint on linen
  bears Warlayirti Artists cat. no. 246/05 and Alcaston Gallery cat. no. AK12037 verso
  150.3 x 99.7 cm
• Provenance:
  Warlayirti Artists, Western Australia; Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne; Private Collection, Melbourne (acquired from the above); This painting is sold with a Waralayirti Artists certificate and Alcaston Gallery documentation.
• References:
  Jane Gimme, Judith Ryan, Samantha Togni & Stephen Williamson, Eubena Nampitjin: Art and Life, Balgo: Warlayirti Artists, 2005, p.61
• Notes:
  By the late 1980s Eubena Nampitjin had emerged as the leading woman artist in the community at Balgo in the Tanami Desert. Married to her second husband, the maparn (healer) and painter Wimmitji Tjapanangka (c.1924-2000), theirs was one of the great husband and wife artist collaborations in Australian art. Born during the 1920s, Eubena (a Europeanized form of her traditional name, Yupina) was brought up in the traditional manner in her homelands around Kunawarritji - Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. In fact it was the Stock Route, originally surveyed in 1906, that disrupted her family's access to their customary lands and the natural resources these provided. Eubena married young, to Purung Tjakata Tjapaltjarri, known as Gimme, and following the birth of her first daughters moved to the cattle station at Billiluna on the northern stretch of the Stock Route. Eventually Eubena and her family moved to the mission at Balgo. Here, she used her extensive knowledge of Kukatja and Wangkatjunga cosmology to assist the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt in their researches into desert culture. After Gimme's death she married Wimmitji in the late 1970s. Eubena and Wimmitji were represented in the landmark exhibition that announced the artists of Balgo to the world: Aboriginal Art from the Great Sandy Desert at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1986. The exhibition had been organized with the help of the Berndts. Since then, Eubena had been represented in several major exhibitions in Australia and abroad, including: Images of Power: Aboriginal art of the Kimberley at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1993; Aratjara: Art of the First Australians, at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, the Hayward Gallery, London, and the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, in 1993-94; Stories: Eleven Aboriginal Artists, Works from The Holmes ˆ Court Collection at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany, in 1995; In Place (Out of Time): Contemporary art in Australia, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England in 1997; and Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, at the National Museum of Australia in 2010. Eubena won the Open Painting section of the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in Darwin in 1998. In the latter years of Wimmitji's life, Eubena and he often collaborated on each others paintings but after his death she developed a stridently individual style featuring a more restricted but bold palette of synthetic versions of the traditional ochre colours to create paintings such as Nyilla, 2005, where colour, as Christine Watson describes ÔÉ becomes a luminous essence rather than a surface descriptor of form' (C. Watson, ÔWhole lot, now: Colour dynamics in Balgo art' in Ryan, J. (ed.), 1994, Power of the Land, Masterpieces of Aboriginal Art, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, p.120). Nyilla is a site associated with Wimmitji; it is where Wimmitji had lived and where his father had died. The Warlayirti Artists documentation of the painting describes the four central circles as waterholes, named, from top to bottom, Nyilla, Minyilpa, Wangartu and Tjumu. The circle above represents Nurreematitch. The waterholes are surrounded by sandhills. Wally Caruana
• Estimate:
  A$20,000 - 30,000
• 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.