Born near the claypan and soakwater site of Wala Wala in the far reaches of the Western Desert, in approximately 1943, George Tjungurrayi's initial contact with the outside world occurred as a seventeen-year-old boy. He is the younger brother of the famous Naata Nungurrayi. He left the Gibson Desert on foot in the company of three other Pintupi companions to walk the long road east until intercepted by a truck just south of Mount Doreen. Soon after walking into Papunya in 1962, he became a guide for Jeremy Long’s welfare patrol into Pintupi country later that year. He finally settled in West Camp, Papunya, where he began painting around 1976 after encouragement from Nosepeg Tjupurrula.

Over the following decade, George worked intermittently at Yayayi and Mount Liebig, and also Walungurru. His works created during the 1970s and throughout the 1980s were characterized by the ubiquitous dotted grids of lines and circles common to works by Yala Yala Gibbs, Anatjari Tjamptjinpa, and others who played a formative influence in Pintupi Tingari imagery. While painting at Papunya and its outstations in the late 1970s, George worked in close proximity to these and other ‘established’ artists. It was not until well into the mid-1980s that he expanded his palette beyond the autumnal tones created by the basic palette of red, yellow, black, and white by mixing in a wider array of colours and experimenting stylistically.

His preoccupation from the outset had been the ceremonial activities and men’s stories associated with the travels of the Tingari ancestors as they relate to his most significant sites, including his birthplace Wala Wala, and the region surrounding Kiwirrkura, Lake Mackay, Kulkuta, Karku, Ngaluwinyamana, and Kilpinya to the north-west of Kintore. His art first achieved prominence when exhibited in "Friendly Country-Friendly People," organized by Dick Kimber for the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs in 1990. The work selected included the figurative representation of the Snake, Kunia, curled at its ancestral home in Karrilwarra. However, figuration in his work had always been rare, and by 1994, George had forsaken figurative imagery altogether in favour of works entirely composed of duo-tone linear roundels and shapes arranged in tight formal geometric patterns that pulsed with a subtle optical rhythm.

His works had always suggested a sacred geometry related to topographic depictions of the sites visited by the Tingari, but from this period onward, his paintings grew increasingly distanced stylistically from their ceremonial origins and the application of distinct dotted brush strokes. Tjungurrayi depicts the Tingari Dreaming Cycle and the sacred sites of his ancestral history. However, he departs from the characteristic style of Western Desert painting with its distinct dotted style, in his minimalist approach to iconography and by creating linear effects through the paint.

In common with Ronnie Tjampitjinpa and Turkey Tolson, George experimented for a time with four-panelled squares and rectangles before returning to transverse parallel lines that made eccentric deviations toward the margins of the painted surface. According to Judith Ryan, the major Tingari Dreaming that Tjungurrayi created in 1996, now hanging in the National Gallery of Victoria, marks the moment at which he reached the ‘conceptual distillation’ of his signature style. ‘The gently brushed pale mauve and plum lines create tonal reflections and visual sensations, like reverberations in a lake’. While the final work is duotone in appearance, the artist has technically worked in four layers by painting and overpainting two shades of subtle colour with different pigment densities in quivering perfect parallel lines. The work, according to Ryan, became a template for his paintings that followed.

This stylistic departure from ceremonial origins was part of a larger movement of the Papunya Tula artists, which Rex Butler has described as fundamentally abstract and modernist. ‘The decisions Tjungurrayi makes in putting together his paintings are first of all artistic... (thus) it is not culturally specific; its specificity is that belonging to painting itself'. Regardless of whether Tjungurrayi’s art, along with that of Emily Kngwarreye for instance, is mediated by culture and history, or free of it, this approach to the act of painting itself has certainly been accepted in the art market.

The work of a number of Papunya men, including George, Willy Tjungurrayi, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Mick Namarari, and Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, can clearly be seen as a move away from traditional conventions. The magical power of these works draws on their original source, and primary influence, that of the ancient artistic lexicon inherent in the fluted carving, keyed designs, and fine parallel lines that embellish men’s ceremonial shields and sacred objects. They have no focus but invite the viewer to enter a crucial cultural performance. The energy and life-force enacted onto the painted surface evokes sensations and sensibilities that must primarily be experienced and felt. The eye of the viewer travels over the surface of these paintings, paralleling the way they move over nature. In doing so, they are charged with an intensity that can become disorienting.

While they continue to symbolize ancestral journeys and ceremonial body paint designs, they find immediate favour amongst collectors in an era of modernist globalism as they fit neatly with western notions of abstract minimalism and have serendipitous aesthetic parallels with works created contemporaneously by ‘Op-art’ and ‘simulationist’ artists such as Victor Vasarely, Ross Bleckner, Phillip Taaffe, and Bridget Riley. As with the works of his Pintupi male contemporaries, George Tjungurrayi’s works have no real focus yet they can be ‘inhabited, so that the mind’s eye, or the eye’s mind, can move about them credibly’. In common with early works by Riley, ‘nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces, an event rather than an appearance’.

George Tjungurrayi held his first solo exhibitions in 1997 in Sydney and in 1998 in Melbourne, following which Robert Rooney wrote a rave review in the Melbourne Age. By 2000, George Tjungurrayi had become one of Papunya Tula’s most sought-after painters and was listed amongst Art Collector magazine’s 50 most collectable artists in 2003, the same year that he had been included in the exhibition "Meridian, Focus on Contemporary Aboriginal Art" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. His work featured in the landmark exhibition "Talking about Abstraction" at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in 2004, an exhibition intended to compare works by Western and Indigenous artists and examine the ways in which each was directly influenced by or resonant with the other.

In 2006, he was highly commended at the 34th Alice Prize, and the following year he was selected as a finalist in the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. George Tjungurrayi’s work is held in many important international museums including the Groniger Museum in the Netherlands and the Musee des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie in Paris. Alongside Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, George Tjungurrayi has now become the principal living exponent of Pintupi men’s art. He also has pieces featuring in a vast majority of the national and state-owned cultural institutions across Australia, most notably the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Ningura Napurrula was born in 1938 at Watulka in Central Australia. She married the renowned Pintupi artist Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, and together with their son Maurice, travelled to the Papunya community in the 1960s, after having encountered a Welfare Patrol.

Ningura Napurrula commenced painting for the Papunya Tula Artists Cooperative in 1996. Ningura’s aesthetic is somewhat different from other Kintore women, as she has developed Yala Yala Gibbs’s classic Pintupi style into her own softer, more organic vision.

Ningura Napurrrula paints very delicately, slowly building up her forms, as she recalls the mythological events of her Ancestors. Her subject matter focuses on the travels of her female Ancestors, the sacred sites that they passed, and the mythological significance of the bush tucker that they collected. These travels and rituals help to explain contemporary customs and the ceremonial lives of these powerful Pintupi women.

As a young lad close to 13 years of age, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa walked with his family out of the West Australian desert and settled into life in the tumultuous and crowded settlement of Papunya. It was the height of the assimilationist era as the Australian Government oversaw the movement of traditional nomadic people from their Pintupi homelands.

In 1971, at the dawn of the Desert painting movement, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa was in his late 20s. After attending the European-style school in Papunya, he returned to the Western Desert, went through initiation at Umari near his birthplace in the region near Muyinnga, about 100 km west of the Kintore Ranges, spent time in Yuendumu, and then returned to live with his relatives in Papunya. There he worked as a police tracker, health worker, and labourer.

His earlier tribal initiation into ceremonial knowledge, along with his familiarity with country and sacred sites, stood him in good stead when he began painting in his early thirties, under the tutelage of Old Mick Tjakamarra. As senior custodian of the Honey Ant Dreaming, Tjakamarra had played an instrumental role in initiating the Papunya art movement. Ronnie was one of the youngest men who began painting in the mid-1970s, and his artistic output was initially small as he moved regularly between Papunya, Yuendumu, and Mount Doreen Station. As the younger generation no longer lived in close proximity to their traditional homelands, painting had become an important means for the older law keepers to pass on their knowledge of sacred sites. Ronnie, having been initiated, became an important participant and mediator in this process.

The classic Pintupi style of linked concentric circles tells of a sacred geometry. It is derived from body paint designs, cartography of country, and ancestral narratives. A consolidating conformity existed between the older painters as they worked out the ground rules for telling the Dreaming while protecting sacred content. Being one of the youngest to begin painting, Ronnie began to demonstrate a more bold and expressionistic approach. Laborious, individual dots evolved into linked or ‘flicked’ dotting and a strong linear emphasis. Distinct iconographic features such as circles and U shapes were relinquished in favour of abstraction and the creation of a vibrant, painterly surface.

These developments were encouraged by the return to tribal lands that was facilitated by a change in government and Indigenous policies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa was a strong advocate for this outstation movement that was given impetus and partly funded by Papunya art sales. During this period, he travelled to Yuendumu, Balgo Hills, and Mount Doreen, encouraging as many people as he could to return to their traditional Pintupi lands.

In 1983, he moved with his family to the small settlement of Ininti-Redbank, near Kintore, and stopped painting for a few years due to his political involvements. This included becoming chairman of the Kintore outstations council and his involvement in important claims for land rights. He had already pioneered new ways of interpreting his ancient visual language and soon returned to painting with new enthusiasm, describing politics as 'too much humbug'. The more focused environment of his own community fuelled his distinct aesthetic preoccupation.

In 1984, Tjampitjinpa won the Northern Territory Art Award. This became controversial when other contestants complained that Papunya art was folk art and not worthy of the ‘high art’ title, a strangely persistent attitude in some art circles at that time. The moment became an historic landmark when Judge Nancy Underhill upheld her decision defending his entry, Happening at Mt. Leibig, as genuine art and notably of the highest standard.

Demand for Tjampitjinpa’s work grew, and his leaning towards painterly abstraction was increasingly favoured and encouraged by the contemporary art market. He emerged as a leading figure, sustaining the boom in the national and international reputation of Aboriginal art during the 1990s. Ronnie's works first appeared in Papunya Tula exhibitions during the 1970s, and later in commercial art galleries in Sydney and Melbourne throughout the 1980s. He won the Alice Springs Art Prize in 1988.

More than any other figure, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa can be credited with having forged a new artistic direction in embracing a new aesthetic minimalism, thereby freeing up further possibilities for the younger up-coming generation of painters, and challenging fixed perceptions of Western Desert art. His hypnotic designs explore interacting geometric shapes which emanate an eye-catching, pulsating action. Still infused with the Dreamings of his mythical Tingari ancestors, Tjampitjinpa refined the characteristic Pintupi simplicity of design, boldly scaling up fundamental pictorial elements, freeing them from their iconographic reference points and strongly emphasizing the distinctive repetition of line and form that has always infused Pintupi art with the spirit of their vast and ancient lands.

From the mid-1990s, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa began painting for a wide array of dealers, only occasionally returning to work with Papunya Tula. Works carrying the Papunya Tula certification and in this size and quality are very, very rare, and if you are to buy something in this price range, you should ensure it is coming from the best possible, ethical source. Even though Ronnie frequently worked for other dealers, Papunya Tula organised solo exhibitions for him across Australia, and in 2004 he was elected Chairman of the company. His work has been included in major survey exhibitions in Australia and overseas, yet he eschews the trappings of fame and fortune as he divides his time between working as a painter and his ceremonial obligations. Able to earn money wherever he goes, Ronnie is the quintessential modern nomad, familiarly known across a wide expanse of country as he constantly travels in his four-wheel drive with his spears tied on the roof.

A couple of years ago, Ronnie's work was accepted into the esteemed collection of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Located on the banks of the River Seine, neighbouring the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, and at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, the Musée du quai Branly is a leading French museum, housing extraordinary art collections from Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas. This will only add to the demand for his work. He is, of course, in every major collection out there that has Aboriginal content, and he is unfortunately one of the last links to that magical initial group of people that started this modern Aboriginal art movement.

Aubrey was born on 11th February 1974 at the Pintupi outstation of Yayi Yayi, approximately 30km west of Papunya. Yayi Yayi was a temporary settlement set up by the Pintupi people as they began their migration back to their Western Desert homelands from Papunya, where they had earlier been centralised by the government welfare branch. After the establishment of Walungurru (Kintore) in the early eighties, Aubrey lived for a while on his father’s oustation known as Ininti, slightly north west of the community.

Aubrey went through traditional law in Tjukurla and has since been a permanent resident of Walungurru (Kintore). He is the son of world renowned painter Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, a shareholder, former Director of Papunya Tula Artists, and one of the most successful artists in the company’s history. His mother, Mary Brown Napangati is also a significant senior
Papunya Tula artist.

Aubrey learned to paint studying under his father in the Kintore studio for many decades. He painted his first works for Papunya Tula Artists in 2019, having inherited custodial rights for his father’s Tjukurrpa (Dreaming Stories) and signature mark-making techniques, as is traditional. As a traditional owner of the Country close to Walungurru, Aubrey’s paintings refer to the stories central to that area, including the stories of the Minyma Kutjarra (Two Travelling Women), Ngintaka (Perentie Dreaming) and Waru (Fire Dreaming) at Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay).

Mantua was born at Tjulyurru circa 1959. She is the daughter of Anatjari Tjampitjinpa and the sister of George Yapa Tjangala, Ray James Tjangala and Yinarupa Nangala, all of whom have painted for Papunya Tula Artists. 

Mantua Nangala is a senior Pintupi Lore Woman and Papunya Tula artist. Her family was displaced from their Country during her childhood, and they moved between settlements across Western Australia for many years. In 1964, they were forcibly settled on the government reserve of Papunya, along with many other Pintupi, Anmatyerre, Warlpiri, and Arrernte peoples. In 1981, following the establishment of the Kintore and Kiwirrkura communities, Nangala relocated to Kintore, later settling in Kiwirrkura in Western Australia, the nearest community to her Pintupi homelands.

Nangala is the daughter of Anatjari Tjampitjinpa, and sister of Ray James Tjangala, Yinarupa Nangala, and George Yapa Tjangala, all illustrious Papunya Tula artists. Her Country lies west of Kiwirrkura and extends deep into the Gibson Desert, where rippling tali (sand dunes) dominate the landscape. Nangala began painting for Papunya Tula Artists in 1998, quickly developing a distinctive style to express her intimate connection to Country and impart the respective histories and narratives of place. Her painting practice relates to her Tjukurrpa (ancestral knowledge), particularly the epic travels of the Kanaputa women as they traversed the artist’s Country, their adventures shaping and creating many significant sites, including Mukula, Marrapinti, and Yunala.

Throughout her work, Nangala employs a fine dotting technique applied through a slow and meticulous process of mark-making. Rhythmic patterns sprawl across her canvases, manifesting themselves in a range of muted tonal gradients pierced by soft creamy whites. The resulting dotted undulations evoke the ever-moving tali of the Gibson Desert. This artful combination of the momentous and the minute conveys the significance of her Country, and her intimate knowledge of every detail.

Nangala’s mark-making creates the illusion of movement, reflecting both the immensity and the intricacies of the desert landscape—in particular, the interaction of light, wind, and sand.

The family are mentioned in Douglas Lockwood’s book The Lizard Eaters. In 2022, the National Gallery of Australia featured five large scale paintings by Mantua in their 4th Annual Indigenous Art Triennale exhibition, ‘Ceremony’, curated by Hetti Perkins.

Angus Tjungurrayi was born in Alice Springs on June 1st 1988. He is the son of internationally-renowned Papunya Tula artists Warlimpirrgna Tjapaltjarri and Yalti Napangati, both members of the Pintupi Nine – the last remaining group of traditional hunter-gatherers who first encountered settler Australians in 1984. 

Angus lives and works in Kiwirrkura community, one of the most remote communities in the world situated deep in the Western Desert, 700km west of Mparntwe/Alice Springs.

Angus heralds from a strong linegae of artists, including uncles Walala and Tamayinya Tjapaltjarri, Robert and Vincent Nanala and auntie, Winifred Nanala. He regularly paints his custodial sites and associated Tjukurrpa (Dreaming Stoires) including Wilkinkarra (Lake Mckay) and the secret-sacred Tingari song-cycle. Angus learnt to paint watching his father in the Kiwirrkura studio, utilising the optical techniques his father is famous for – ‘flashes’ that encode and reveal esoteric meaning. Unlike his father, Angus’ works are often hard, angular, geometric compositions with Western characters of personal meaning embedded, merging traditional and contemporary Pintupi life.