Warlugulong
Warlugulong is an acrylic on canvas painting by Indigenous Australian artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. The work was sold by art dealer Hank Ebes on 24 July 2007, setting a record price for a contemporary Indigenous Australian art work bought at auction. It exemplifies a distinctive painting style developed by Papunya Tula artists in the 1970s, and blends representation of landscape with ceremonial iconography.
About Warlugulong in brief
Warlugulong is an acrylic on canvas painting by Indigenous Australian artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. The work was sold by art dealer Hank Ebes on 24 July 2007, setting a record price for a contemporary Indigenous Australian art work bought at auction. It exemplifies a distinctive painting style developed by Papunya Tula artists in the 1970s, and blends representation of landscape with ceremonial iconography. The painting illustrates the story of an ancestral being called Lungkata, together with eight other dreamings associated with localities about which the artist had traditional knowledge. It was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for A$2.4million in 2007. It has been described as one of the most important 20th-century Australian paintings. It is taken from a location roughly 300 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs associated with a powerful desert dreaming. The artist would often collaborate with other artists, particularly his brother Tim Leura, and the brothers together created the 1976 work of the same name.
The two images are amongst five that the artist created between 1976 and 1979 that linked the iconography of sacred stories to geographic representation of his country. Like the other works of the period that are symbolic maps of the artist’s country, the painting is accompanied by annotated diagrams of the images and notes that explain the dreamings that they include. It portrays elements of nine distinct dreamings, of which the central motif is the Bluetongue Lizard Man, an ancestral figure responsible for creating bushfire. Around this central motif are arranged elements of eight other stories, all of them represented at least in part by sets of footprints. The images of this period are visually complex, and contain a wide variety of patterns unified by strong background motifs and structure.
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This page is based on the article Warlugulong published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
