Born: c.1945-2019, Haasts Bluff, Northern Territory
Language: Pintupi
Known as: Mitjili Naparrula, Mitjili Napurulla, Mitjili Napurrurla
Dreamings: Watiya Tjuta (Many Trees), Uwalki, Kulata Tjukurrpa (Spear Dreaming), Irantji
Mitjili Napurrula was born around 1945 into one of the most significant artistic families of the Western Desert. Her father was Tupa Tjakamarra. Her mother was the painter Tjunkiya Napaltjarri, a Pintupi/Luritja woman who came in to Haasts Bluff from her own country during a long drought. Her brother was Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, a founding figure of Papunya Tula Artists and later its chairman. She married the Haasts Bluff painter Long Tom Tjapanangka at Papunya in the 1960s, and the two of them lived at Haasts Bluff and Mount Liebig.
She started painting in the early 1990s, when the Ikuntji Women's Centre opened at Haasts Bluff and gave the women of the community a place to work. She and Long Tom were both part of the group who built that art centre's reputation. Her first canvases sat close to the Papunya Tula painting of the day, but within a few years she had cut her imagery right back to something that was unmistakably hers. In 1999 she won the Alice Prize, and from there her work travelled to collections and exhibitions overseas. She kept painting at an outstation near Papunya in her later years, and passed away in April 2019.
Her method was simple and she stayed with it. A small number of shapes repeated across the canvas, most often the branching tree form her mother had drawn for her in the sand. The shapes go down in flat, strong colour, and the field around them is built up in dotting so fine and so thinned that it reads as one continuous surface rather than as separate dots. Colour and scale carry the painting. Some works are two tones set hard against each other, others run the full range of desert colour, and the repeated forms set up a rhythm that shifts as you move across the front of the canvas.
DREAMINGS
Watiya Tjuta (Many Trees) - Watiya means tree and tjuta means many. These are the spearwood and desert oak trees that grow through her father's country, and their wood was cut and worked into spear shafts. Mitjili held the right to paint the source of the spears. The ceremony itself belongs to the men and does not appear in her work. Her mother taught her the shape of the tree by drawing it in the sand, and she carried that shape for the rest of her painting life.
Uwalki - her father's country, west of Haasts Bluff toward the Kintore Ranges and out into the Gibson Desert. Ancient, open country of long red sandhills, low scrub and stands of trees running across the sand. Like many desert artists she painted it from above, so the trees read as a pattern spread across the country rather than a line on a horizon.
Kulata Tjukurrpa (Spear Dreaming) - inherited by Mitjili and her brother Turkey Tolson from their father. It belongs to a site in the Gibson Desert, south of Kintore, where the ancestors gathered and assembled their spears before a conflict. Turkey became known for painting the straightening of the spears. Mitjili painted the women's side of the same story, the trees and the places the wood came from.
Irantji - a ranges motif that came into her later paintings, given to her by her husband Long Tom Tjapanangka, who was known for his own paintings of the ranges around Haasts Bluff. In her hands the hills sit as blocks and curves of solid colour alongside the tree forms.
EXHIBITIONS AND COLLECTIONS
Mitjili exhibited widely in Australia and internationally from 1993 onward, and her work is held in major public collections here and overseas.
AWARDS
1999 Alice Prize, Alice Springs
1997 14th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Darwin, finalist
1996 Australian Heritage Art Award, Canberra
1995 12th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Darwin, finalist
1994 Northern Territory Art Award, Alice Springs
1994 Australian Heritage Art Award, Canberra
1993 Australian Heritage Art Award, Canberra
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
1993, 1994, 1996, 1998 Australian Heritage Art Award, Canberra
1994 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
1994, 1997, 1998, 1999 Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
1994 Australian High Commission, Singapore
1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin
1996 The Meeting Place, touring exhibition, Australia
1997 Mulch and Metaphors: The Garden in Contemporary Art, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria
1997 Alliance Francaise, Canberra
1997 Goteborgs Konstforening, Gothenburg, Sweden
1997 Dreamings: Aboriginal Kunst uit Australie, Netherlands
1998 Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne
1999 Spirit Country: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, USA
2000 Beyond the Pale, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia
2000 Ikuntji Tjuta, touring exhibition, regional galleries NSW, QLD, SA and NT
COLLECTIONS
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin
Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide
Edith Cowan University Art Collection, Perth
Artbank
Kaplan and Levi Collection, Seattle, USA
Fondation Burkhardt-Felder Arts et Culture, Motiers, Switzerland
This painting can be hung vertically or horizontally.
This painting was purchased directly from the Mitjili and a gallery certificate of authenticity will be provided with the sale.
