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This powerful work by Wentja Morgan Napaltjarri, created in 2015, masterfully illustrates one of the artist's primary totems and embodies the spiritual strength that has made her a major figure in contemporary Aboriginal art. Titled Blue Tongue (Blue-Tongued Lizard), this acrylic on linen painting (95 × 60 cm) demonstrates the distinctive style that characterizes Wentja's artistic maturity. Through her sophisticated geometric composition of concentric circles surrounded by hypnotic fields of meticulous dots, the artist represents the waterholes and ceremonial sites associated with this ancestral totem, with the space between the circles symbolizing the seeds consumed by the animal.
With its subtle chromatic palette blending ochres, blacks, whites, and earthy tones, this canvas creates a meditative effect of depth and energy. The concentric circles, motifs inherited from her father Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, function as powerful mandalas evoking the rockholes where her family regularly camped during their journey through the Gibson Desert. This work, accompanied by its certificate of authenticity from the Desart Art Centre with a photograph of the artist holding her creation, attests to the exceptional authenticity of this piece. The composition also reveals that mysterious quality inherent in Wentja's work: some of the information contained in her paintings remains secret, which precisely imbues them with remarkable spiritual and aesthetic power.
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Wentja Morgan Napaltjarri (circa 1943-2021), a prominent Pintupi artist, was the daughter of Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, one of the emblematic founders of the Western Desert art movement. Born in Malparinga, west of Kintore in the Gibson Desert, as a child she experienced her family's forced exodus to Haasts Bluff in 1948, a significant journey during which they followed the tracks of the Ancestral Emu Men, traveling from waterhole to waterhole. Initially trained as her father's apprentice in Papunya, she participated in collective family works before developing her own artistic career in Mt Liebig in 1995-96 for the Watiyawanu Artists collective. Her style evolved from traditional pointillist motifs to hypnotic fields of tonal colors characterized by large circular patterns representing rockholes. A multiple finalist for the prestigious Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (2001-2004, 2006-2008) and the Alice Prize (2004), her works are held in the world's most important collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Kerry Stokes and Thomas Vroom collections, and have been exhibited internationally, notably at the Masterpieces from the Western Desert exhibition in London in 2003. More information about the artist
