Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri: the Pintupi painter who walked out of the Gibson Desert in 1984 and began painting for Papunya Tula Artists three years later
In October 1984, two young Pintupi men sent by their mothers to find long-lost relatives encountered a man trying to fix a flat tyre at the Mt Webb outstation near Kiwirrkurra in Western Australia. One of them was Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, born around 1958 at Tjuurlnga in the Angus Hills, east of where Kiwirrkurra now stands. His family group of nine, comprising four brothers, three sisters, and two mothers, had lived a traditional nomadic life in the country west of Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay), deliberately avoiding all contact with the outside world following the wishes of the senior men who raised them. Their arrival at Kiwirrkurra on 19 October made international headlines. They became known as the Pintupi Nine, or the Last Nomads. Robert Hughes later documented their story in the BBC/ABC series Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000). After a few months, Warlimpirrnga's half-brother Piyirti slipped away and walked back into the desert. Warlimpirrnga has said he is the only person who knows where Piyirti is.
In 1987, Warlimpirrnga began painting for Papunya Tula Artists in Kiwirrkurra. His first eleven works were shown at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne in 1988 and were purchased by Ron and Nellie Castan, who donated them to the National Gallery of Victoria. He subsequently encouraged his brothers Thomas (Tamayinya) and Walala to paint, and by the late 1990s all three were exhibiting widely. In 2012, Warlimpirrnga participated in documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany. His first international solo exhibition was held at Salon 94 in New York in 2015, and he is now represented by Gagosian.
Warlimpirrnga paints Tingari Cycle and Snake Dreaming stories for his country, including the sites of Marawa, Kanapilya, the salt lake Kalparti, the large swamp Minatapinya, and Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay), where his family lived. His technique generates powerful optical effects: tight, meandering lines of thousands of dots build rectilinear forms across the canvas, deriving from the iconography of male body decoration used in ceremonial performance of Tingari stories. The resulting surfaces shimmer and pulse, the parallel dotted lines creating an almost electromagnetic visual field. Anthropologist Fred Myers, who has studied the Pintupi since the early 1970s, has noted that Warlimpirrnga is highly respected in his homeland for his knowledge and that his paintings are directly tied to that standing.
His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.
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