Nowee Nangala

Kayili

1996

This work was included in the exhibition Papunya Women at Utopia Art Sydney in 1996. The exhibition was the first outside of Mparntwe (Alice Springs) to feature the women artists of Papunya Tula Artists. The exhibition signaled a decisive shift in the painting movement as women introduced a looser, more gestural approach to mark making. This work depicts a cave and soakage site in the Gibson Desert where ancestral women gathered to perform ceremonies. Located considerably further south-west than the sites depicted by most artists at Papunya Tula, it reveals the vast extent of Western Desert people’s familial and ceremonial connections.

Language Group: Mantjiltjara
Dates: 1945-1997

Nowee Nangala lived in Kiwirrkurra in a family of artists, the wife of Brandy Tjungurrayi and the sister of Josephine Nangala. Nowee only painted for Papunya Tula Artists for a year before her death, producing a small number of luminous canvases. She was included in the exhibition Papunya Women at Utopia Art Sydney in 1996, the first exhibition outside of Alice Springs to feature the women of Papunya Tula Artists, from which John W. Kluge and the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired her work. Her daughters Theresa and Geraldine Nowee Napaltjarri have built successful careers painting for Warlayirti Artistsin Wirrimanu (Balgo).

NOWEE NANGALA, Kayili, 1996

Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. 35 3/4 x 18 in. (90.81 x 45.72 cm). Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, Gift of John W. Kluge, 1997. 1997.0006.001.

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