Ningura Napurrula, Wirrulnga, 2006

Lot description

NINGURA NAPURRULA 1938 - 2013 Wirrulnga, 2006 acrylic on linen 91 x 91 cm bears inscription verso: Ningura Napurrula, Papunya Tula Artists, NN0603180; Utopia Art Sydney label adhered verso PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, Northern Territory, Cat No. NN0603180 Utopia Art Sydney, New South Wales The Collection of Dame Marie Bashir AD CVO and Sir Nicholas Shehadie AC OBE, Sydney, New South Wales Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EXHIBITED P.T.A, 17 June - 8th July 2006, Utopia Art Sydney, NSW Ningura Napurrula was born around 1938 in the Western Desert and did not encounter non-Indigenous Australians until 1984, when she walked in to Kiwirrkura with a group of Pintupi people. She began painting not long after and became one of the most quietly powerful artists to emerge from that community. Her compositions are restrained, her palettes spare, and her surfaces carry a sense of movement without ever fixing the landscape in place. The painting holds ancestral knowledge and lived experience together without announcing either. It simply is what it is, and that is more than enough. This painting depicts Wirrulnga, a rockhole site in a small rocky outcrop east of the Kiwirrkura Community in Western Australia. It is here that a group of ancestral Napaltjarri and Napurrula women camped after travelling from the rockhole at Ngaminya further west. The large roundel at the centre of the composition is the rockhole itself. The lines beside it trace the form of a pregnant Napaltjarri woman who gave birth at the site. Wirrulnga is a place associated with birth, and that meaning runs through everything in the painting. © NINGURA NAPURRULA / Copyright Agency, 2026