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Yukultji Napangati

About

Yukultji Napangati (born 1975) was born north of Kiwirrkurra near Wilkinkarra, a vast salt lake in Western Australia. She left her traditional hunting-and-gathering life in 1984 and became a member of the “Pintupi Nine,” one of the last Indigenous groups to come out of the desert and make first contact with modern Australian society. As much an active forager in the environment as a painter, Yukultji began painting at Kiwirrkurra in 1996, at first with the other women who started there and later with her husband, Charlie Ward Tjakamarra. Yukultji articulates her relationship to “Country” and her desert upbringing in a style that is both restrained and enigmatic.

Drawing on ancestral narratives or Dreamings passed down to her through generations, her distinctive style involves intense and refined mark making on large canvases to produce optical sensations related to natural phenomena. Her subject matter is the mythological ancestral women whose travels and activities shaped the landforms of her Country. Yukultji’s shimmering surfaces and subtle use of color first captured a wider audience through her inclusion in the Primavera exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 2005. Her work resides in public and private collections in Australia and the United States.