Clifford possum tjapaltjarri wikipedia
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Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
Reclaiming the land
In 1976 a BBC documentary crew traveled deep into Australia’s Northern Territory to watch Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and his brother Tim Leura paint a masterpiece. Tjapaltjarri was 44, and one of the founders of a flourishing art community in the small aboriginal village of Papunya. The artwork he created, called Warlugulong, was the largest the Papunya artists had ever attempted, and combined nine events and locations of the Dreaming—the mythic cosmology of the Aboriginal cultures.
Tjapaltjarri had been a part of the Papunya art community for four years and was one of their most successful and respected artists, but it was his previous career as a stockman working on central Australia’s pastoral stations, or ranches, that made him uniquely qualified for the project. On the stations, Tjapaltjarri roamed the land that had been home to 50,000 years of aboriginal people, displaced by the rapid colonization of the early 1900s. Tjap
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Warlugulong
1977 painting by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
Warlugulong is a 1977 acrylic on canvas painting by Indigenous Australian artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.[notes 1] Owned for many years by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the work was sold by art dealer Hank Ebes on 24 July 2007, setting a record price for a contemporary Indigenous Australian art work bought at auction when it was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for A$2.4 million. The painting illustrates the story of an ancestral being called Lungkata, together with eight other dreamings associated with localities about which Clifford Possum had traditional knowledge. It exemplifies a distinctive painting style developed by Papunya Tula artists in the 1970s, and blends representation of landscape with ceremonial iconography. Art critic Benjamin Genocchio describes it as "a work of real national significance [and] one of the most important 20th-century Australian paintings".[ •Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri:List of works