Ronnie Tjampitjinpa was born in 1943
in Tjiturrunya, Western Australia. His family moved extensively
across the Pintupi and Northern Territories, living in the
semi-nomadic Aboriginal manner that has been tradition for over
40,000 years. Shortly after his initiation into manhood in the
early 1950's, Tjampitjinpa and his family moved to Haasts Bluff and
then later joined relatives at the newly settled Papunya community,
where Tjampitjinpa found work as a fencer making the yards for
cattle in the surrounding area. He began painting around 1971, in
response to the burgeoning desert art movement in Papunya and is
now widely regarded as one of the most accomplished senior artists
of the Papunya Tula School and Aboriginal Art in
general.
Tjampitjinpa's work follows the Pintupi style, in which a
predominance of strong circular forms and connecting lines form the
basis for an artistic expression of 'the Dreaming' - the set of
spiritual and creationist beliefs associated with the artist, their
ancestral lineage and their 'country'. Thematically, Tjampitjinpa's
work is based on the Tingari Cycle, a secret song cycle sacred to
initiated men. In ancestral lore, the Tingari were Dreamtime beings
who travelled across the landscape performing ceremonies to create
and shape the country now associated with Dreaming sites. The
Tingari gathered at these sites for Maliera (initiation)
ceremonies, which were located at (and thus represented
artistically by) significant rockholes, sand hills, sacred
mountains and water soakages in the Western desert. The Tingari
Cycle is often poetically interpreted as line paintings relating to
the songs of the people and creation stories of Pintupi
mythology.
Tjampitjinpa's work reflects his
direct spiritual ties with his culture in a pure and unadulterated
manner not achieved by most
Aboriginal artists. By expressing his interpretation of the
Dreaming in contemporary media, Tjampitjinpa has not only played a
part in resurrecting and illuminating Aboriginal culture as a
whole, but has also introduced what was traditionally an orally
expressed culture into the realms of modern contemporary art, thus
bridging the gap between the artistic traditions of the colonial
Europeans and expressing the mores and influences of traditional
Aboriginal culture. As a highly-regarded exponent of contemporary
Aboriginal painting, Tjampitjinpa has aided in the promotion and
education of one of the oldest cultures in the world and his work
plays an important role in modern Australian culture. Today,
Tjampitjinpa remains an important influence for a new generation of
indigenous Australian painters.
Tjampitjinpa's works first appeared in Papunya Tula exhibitions
during the 1970s, before his work was discovered by commercial art
galleries in Sydney and Melbourne and exhibited extensively
throughout the 1980's, culminating in successive exhibitions at
Melbourne's Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi from 1987 to 1990. In 1988,
Tjampitjinpa won the Alice Springs Art Prize. He was later selected
for inclusion in major representative Aboriginal survey shows at
the Australian National Gallery, Art Gallery of South Australia,
Lowe Art Museum, and University of Miami and has held noteworthy
exhibitions in Paris, Moscow, St Petersburg, Düsseldorf and Munich.
Tjampitjinpa's work in the groundbreaking retrospective
exhibitionPapunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art
Gallery of New South Wales in 2000 was instrumental in raising the
international profile of Aboriginal art. His work is held in many
public galleries and private collections, including the permanent
collection of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of
Victoria and the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, and
Tjampitjinpa is the current chairperson of the Papunya Tula Artists
Co-operative.