Ningura Naparrula
25.06.22 - 17.06.22
The Gallery of Everything is honoured to present six paintings by Ningura Napurrula (b.1938 - 2013, Australia).
Paintings by Indigenous Australian artists have long been misunderstood and misrepresented by the international art community. They are regularly dismissed, idolised, merchandised, marginalised, mythologised and exoticised.
Yet their truths, and those of their makers, are as complex and layered as any image or object in the multiple histories of the visual. They are contemporary objects, they are talismans; when they originate from a hand as transcendent as that of Ningura Napurrula, the viewer-participant is lifted beyond place and time.
Ningura Napurrula was born in what is today called Western Australia. Her artistic initiation evolved in the 1980s through the Papunya Tula Artists, a collective founded by her husband, the art-maker Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi.
After many years of apprenticeship, a distinct and impressive individuated aesthetic emerged. Ningura Napurrula joined the Kintore/Haasts Bluff project, an all-women’s painting project, and focussed on her own identity as a guardian of the ceremonial.
The material which emerged was profound and breath-taking. Working on linen sourced by her patrons, Ningura Napurrula evolved a practice of distinct colouration and monumental shape. Pieces often focussed on the geography of the region and its role in female history.
The works led to significant local and international acclaim. In 2006 Ningura Napurrula was invited to produce works for The Musée du quai Branly in Paris. She was then exhibited widely until her death in 2013.
Her work is featured in a number of significant collections including those of The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the National Gallery and Museum of Australia.
This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe.
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