Edel Assanti presents Portals to Place, a rare London showing of work by three artists from the legendary Papunya Tula Artists cooperative — one of the most significant art movements in Australian history. Founded in 1972, the cooperative is entirely owned and directed by Aboriginal people from the Western Desert, predominantly of the Luritja/Pintupi language groups, and pioneered the use of acrylic paint on canvas to translate traditional body and sand painting associated with ceremony.
The exhibition brings together paintings by Yukultji Napangati, Lorna Ward Napanangka and John West Tjupurrula. Works by Napangati and Ward Napanangka are presented across two rooms, drawing attention to the formal contrasts and affinities between the two women's practices, and honouring the proximity of their ancestral homelands around Wilkinkara (Lake Mackay). Napangati, who spent her early life living semi-nomadically in the Gibson Desert and was reunited with Pintupi kin at Kiwirrkura in 1984, draws on Dreamings associated with Marrapinti — her mother's Country — creating dense, undulating networks of lines and dots that evoke shimmering heat and windswept sand dunes. Ward Napanangka, daughter of the significant first-generation Papunya Tula artist Timmy Payungka Tjapangardi, portrays Tingari stories from her ancestral Country, combining meticulous layers of line and dot work shot through with sudden ribbons of colour that hint at waterways and safe passage through Country.
In the adjacent gallery, John West Tjupurrula — of a younger generation, and the son of two recognised artists — paints Country with simultaneous perspectives, as seen from above and as experienced travelling on foot. Sinuous, interconnected forms and clusters of marks represent songlines taken by Ancestors in the Dreamtime, informed by his work as a ranger using drones to survey vast expanses of land.
These paintings operate as both map and territory — opaque portals into a radically interconnected understanding of human life and the natural world. The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Tamsin Hong, Exhibitions Curator at Serpentine.