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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Art
• Sale Date:
  06 Jun 2016 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  39
• Lot Description:
  Kitty Kantilla (Kutuwulumi Purawarrumpatu)
  (circa 1928-2003)
  Pumpuni Jilamara (2002)
  natural earth pigments on canvas
  55 x 102 cm
• Provenance:
  Jilamara Arts & Crafts, Northern Territory (122-02); Helen Read Collection, Darwin (PALYA-0887HR)
• References:
  Laverty, C., et al, Beyond Sacred: Recent painting from Australia’s remote Aboriginal communities. The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Kleimeyer Industries, Melbourne, 2011 (Second edition); Ryan, J., et al. Kitty Kantilla, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, p.81).
• Notes:
  This painting is sold with a Jilamara Arts & Crafts certificate. Pumpuni Jilamara (meaning ‘good design’; a characteristic Kitty Kantilla understatement as Una Rey remarks in Laverty 2011:286) belongs to a small series of works bearing the same title that marked the culmination of the ‘Queen of Jilamara,’ Kitty Kantilla’s life as an artist. Painted in 2002, in the year before her death, these paintings, according to Judith Ryan, ‘amount to a radical departure in her practice’ (Ryan in Ryan 2007:81). The complex compositions of her earlier paintings give way to a ‘distillation’ of visual ideas based on a powerful geography of bold forms, each self-contained with areas of tremolo lines, dotting (without the use of the pwoja or wooden comb traditionally used by Tiwi artists to make lines of dots), and sweeps of earthy red, yellow, black and white pigment seemingly absorbed into the very fibre of the canvas as ‘chords in a four-part harmony’ (ibid: 81). Kantilla’s paintings hark back to what has been termed ‘old style’ Tiwi painting such as that found on early Pukumani burial poles and tutini bark baskets collected by the anthropologist Charles Mountford in 1954. Indeed, Kitty Kantilla lived a traditional life, and after a brief experience in the Catholic Mission on Bathurst Island, in the 1970s she moved to the community at Paru on Melville Island along with a group of elder women to put some distance between themselves and European influences. At Paru, Kantilla began to make figurative sculptures in ironwood that she decorated in body painting designs. These designs were later transferred to bark and canvas as she abandoned sculpture: as in many of her paintings, the black ground in Pumpuni Jilamara is strongly suggestive of black skin. Late in life, Kitty Kantilla had a stellar career having been exhibited in several major exhibitions in Australia and abroad, including Beyond the Pale in the Adelaide Biennale at Art Gallery of South Australia in 2000; The Dark and the Light at the Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg, Austria in 2001, the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2003, and posthumously in EXPLAINED, A closer look at Aboriginal art at the AAMU Contemporary Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands in 2004. The National Gallery of Victoria mounted a major retrospective exhibition of her work in 2007. Wally Caruana
• Estimate:
  A$30,000 - 50,000
• 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.