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This powerful work by Wentja Morgan Napaltjarri, created in 2015, masterfully illustrates one of the artist's main totems and embodies the spiritual strength that has made her a leading figure in contemporary Aboriginal art. Entitled Blue Tongue, this acrylic-on-linen painting (95 × 60 cm format) 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 depicts the waterholes and ceremonial sites associated with this ancestral totem, with the space between the circles symbolizing the seeds consumed by the animal.
Featuring a 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 across the Gibson Desert. This work, accompanied by its Desart Art Centre certificate of authenticity featuring a photograph of the artist holding her creation, bears witness to the exceptional authenticity of this piece. The composition also reveals that mysterious quality inherent to Wentja's work: a portion of the information contained within her paintings remains secret, which is precisely what imparts their remarkable spiritual and aesthetic power.
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Wentja Morgan Napaltjarri (c. 1943–2021), a prominent Pintupi artist, was the daughter of Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, one of the iconic founders of the Western Desert art movement. Born at Malparinga, west of Kintore in the Gibson Desert, as a child she experienced her family's forced exodus to Haasts Bluff in 1948, a momentous journey during which they followed the tracks of the Ancestral Emu Men, traveling from waterhole to waterhole. Initially trained as an apprentice to her father in Papunya, she participated in family collaborative works before developing her own artistic career at Mt Liebig in 1995–96 for the Watiyawanu Artists collective. Her style evolved from traditional dot-work motifs to hypnotic fields of tonal colors characterized by large circular patterns representing rockholes. A multiple finalist in 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 major collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery, and the Kerry Stokes and Thomas Vroom collections, and have been exhibited internationally, notably in the exhibition Masterpieces from the Western Desert in London in 2003. More information about the artist