Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri

Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri (born c. 1958) is a key member of the “Pintupi Nine.” Warlimpirrnga first painted for the cooperative Papunya Tula Artists in 1987, just three years after he and a group of family members walked into Kiwirrkurra in Western Australia after a life lived in the desert without any contact with Australian society. Warlimpirrnga often paints Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay), a vast salt lake, and Murruwa, the more intimate site where his family lived.

Over the years, Warlimpirrnga’s style has evolved from his initial deployment of circular and linear motifs, drawing on the iconography of body decoration and sand drawing most common in the work of the first generation of Desert painters. His large canvases feature rectilinear forms produced out of lines of dots, which originate in local practices of male body decoration, especially in the ceremonial performance of stories from the Tingarri cycle. In his paintings, Warlimpirrnga uses dots in allover treatments as the basis of delineating primary forms. Warlimpirrnga’s earliest paintings were purchased and donated to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Since that time he has also participated in such major exhibitions as documenta 13, in Kassel, Germany.