Willy Tjungurrayi
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About the Artist
One of the most sought after painters of the Western Desert, Willy Tjungurrayi is a senior Pintupi man, entitled by his ancestry and communal position to paint the sacred and secret Tingari cycle. He has been acknowledged as one of the great colourists of contemporary Aboriginal painting.
The brother of respected painters Brandy and George "Hairbrush" Tjungarrayi and the late Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, Willy Tjungurrayi was born at Patjantja, south west of Lake Mackay in the NT c. 1930. He came in to Haast's Bluff in 1956 with other Pintupi people, and began painting for Papunya Tula Artists in 1976. By the 1980s Willy was recognized as a senior Pintupi painter, and he joined the movement of return to the Pintupi homelands. He now lives at Walungurru.
Stories from the Tingari Dreaming song cycle, and the land around Haast's Bluff, Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay) and Kaakuratintja (Lake MacDonald), are Willy Tjungarrayi's two great linked themes. For some subjects Willy paints dozens of dotted roundels (concentric circles), linked by parallel lines, the spaces between them filled with bright, flat primary and mixed colours, a depiction of the travels and stopping places of the Tingari Men, an image of the rhythmic repetition of the songs associated with the Tjukurpa (Creation era or Dreaming).
More recently, he has also painted endless wavy lines in a shimmer across the canvas on both pale and vivid backgrounds. These paintings illustrate (or witness, might be more correct) the sandhills and the fierce hailstorm that killed the ancestral Tingari Men in the Dreamtime.
Willy Tjungarrayi's work is much sought after, and has been collected into many major private and public collections.
Selected Collections
• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
• Art Gallery of New South Wales
• Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide
• Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra
• The Holmes a Court Collection, Perth
• The Kelton Foundation, Santa Monica, U.S.A.
• Aboriginal Art Museum, The Netherlands
• Artbank, Sydney
Selected Exhibitions
1982
• Georges Gallery, Melbourne.
• Brisbane Festival
• Mori Gallery, Sydney
1983
• Papunya: paintings from the Central Australian Desert, touring exhibition, America and Europe
1985
• Dot and Circle, a retrospective survey of the Aboriginal acrylic paintings of Central Australia, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
1987
• Art and Aboriginality, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth, UK
1988
• Australian Aboriginal Graphics from the Collection of the Flinders University Art Museum
1989
• Aboriginal Art: The Continuing Tradition, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
1991
• The Painted Dream: Contemporary Aboriginal Paintings from the Tim and Vivien Johnson Collection, Auckland Art Gallery and Te Whare Taonga o Aoteroa National Art Gallery, NZ
1994
• Central Australian Aboriginal Art and Craft Exhibition, Araluen Centre, Alice Springs
• Yiribana, Art Gallery of New South Wales
2003
• Kintore Kiwirrkura, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
2004
• Papunya Tula Artists, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Australian Aboriginal Art Collector's Exhibition, Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne
Current local time at Gallery
Opening Hours
Saturday: 9:00AM - 12:00PM
Sunday: Closed
Call Us
1300 362 551 
+61 8 9168 1881
Current local time at Gallery
-
Mon - Fri: 9:00AM - 4:00PM
Opening Hours
Saturday: 9:00AM - 12:00PM
Sunday: Closed -
Call Us
1300 362 551
+61 8 9168 1881
10 Papuana St, Kununurra,
Western Australia, 6743 Australia
