Landscape of feeling
Nicolas Rothwell; 29/4/08
Almost a year ago, after long reflection, Tjunkiya Napaltjarri, the most austere and dramatic stylist among the Western Desert’s senior female painters, began to shift her palette. In place of her trademark molten golds and black, deep-scored lines shimmering like scars cut into space, she started experimenting with a set of softer, easier, more complementary shades. In short order she made herself, at the age of 80, into a colourist, a new kind of painter, seeking after new effects. The fruits of this transformation are on view in her new solo exhibition at Sydney’s Utopia Art gallery: the display makes a potent case for her supremacy among the much-collected Pintupi masters of the desert. All through her painting career Napaltjarri has been seen as a difficult artist, a creator of visual confrontations, whose works contain an air of instability and even of implicit threat. They have a taut, urgent energy about them, while the paintings of the better known, more treasured old women from the desert school are gentler in their impact, and seem almost to soothe and lull the heart with their colour harmonies and their sweeps of curve and line.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23612856-5013172,00.html
Tags: Aboriginal, Art, Australia