Then and Now

Paintings 2002 - 2016

Willie Tjungurrayi, now in his early eighties, has been a painter for four decades. 

Around 2000, he began a series of trademark images structured by bands of parallel linear pattern and charged by overlaid dotted lines. These works evoked the shifting sands of the dunes that stretched to the horizon. They conveyed the vast space and the subtle shifts within it so familiar to the artist, for this is his land, his country. 

It was these works that made his reputation and placed him among the foremost painters of his generation. The early years in this style produced some of the most evocative paintings with subtle shifts and a gestural touch. As time wore on there were fewer works that had this essential quality.

In recent years there has been a dramatic shift in Tjungurrayi’s work. The lines are gone, replaced with the familiar roundels that are the stamp of the ‘dot and circle’ movement. 

Tjungurrayi has embraced the age old symbols of the Pintupi and projected them with a bold and forthright style, forming emblematic statements about place and country. The hand is there, loose in some, shaky in others, but there is a firmness of line and focus.

Older artists often return to the basics, the elemental, and Tjungurrayi has certainly embraced this, with these site specific statements.