Nyapanyapa Yunupingu

Nyapanyapa Yunupingu (c. 1945 – 20 October 2021) was an Australian Yolngu painter and printmaker who lived and worked in the community at Yirrkala, Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory. Yunupingu created works of art that drastically diverge from the customs of the Yolngu people and made waves within the art world as a result. Her work is renowned for its continuously evolving style, increasing in complexity and often, scale, over time. Due to this departure from tradition within her oeuvre, Yunupingu's work had varying receptions from within her community and the broader art world.

Early life Yunupingu was a Yolŋu woman of the Gumatj clan and was born in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, in 1945. She was the daughter of Yolŋu artist and cultural leader Munggurrawuy Yunupingu (c.1905–1979), who was involved with the Yirrkala bark petitions. In a conversation between Nyapanyapa Yunupingu and Will Stubbs, Yunupingu discussed how her father taught her to paint. He told her:Daughter, see this, you will do this in the future. Widowed, she was a wife of Djapu clan leader Djiriny Mununggurr, who died in 1977. She was the sister of brothers Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Mandawuy Yunupingu, and artist sisters Gulumbu Yunupingu, Barrupu Yunupingu, Nancy Gaymala Yunupingu, and Eunice Djerrkngu Yunupingu (1945–2022), among others.

Nyapanyapa Yunupingu grew up working on the mission with her sisters, herding dairy cattle and goats.

Yunupingu began painting at The Yirrkala Printspace, working daily in the centre's outdoor courtyard. Her presence eventually attracted a group of artists to join her (referred to as the "Courtyard Ladies") which included her sisters Barrupu Yunupingu and Gulumbu Yunupingu, as well as Nongirrna Marawili, Mulkun Wirrpanda, and Dhuwarrwarr Marika. Yunupingu made screen prints at first, focusing on a figurative visual style. Yunupingu's early work dealt with personal stories and experiences, creating narratives that were not inspired by ancestral stories or dreamings but rather by her own life and her family history. Nyapanyapa's abstraction in her mayilimiriw paintings may not seem to mean anything, but she was a highly ceremonial person and this work can still be tied to ideas of country and ancestral tradition. Examples from this series of works include Mapu, 2012, and Untitled, 2013, which showcase her minimalistic style through their use of simplified figuration upon a background of thinly hand-drawn lines in white-pipe clay.

Light Painting When the art centre ran out of bark one wet season, Buku-Larrnggay coordinator Will Stubbs gave her some acetate paints and a paint pen, which had been used in an animation project. He noticed a "filigree complexity, of abstract existence" that he had not seen in her work before, and contacted a digital expert from Melbourne, Joseph Brady, to created random permutations and sequences in a looped silent digital file. The result, Light Painting, was installed in the 2012 Sydney Biennale.

Yunupingu's paintings Whilst most of her work falls into the category of mayilimiriw, Yunupingu has created newer works which do contain figurative references. Specifically, she has included Ganyu (stars), which refer to the story of the seven sisters.

Process and materials Yunupingu's practice was one solely performed for her own satisfaction, perhaps hinting at her works independence from tradition and Dreaming narratives in favor of reflections of historical and contemporary events and activities.

Within her mayilimiriw paintings, Yunupingu created a structure to work from by adding in circles, lines, and shapes which she then surrounded with crosshatching, using red, pink, and white earth pigments. Her 2016 exhibition at the Biennale of Sydney contained her larrakitj memorial poles, notable for their non-sacred decoration. In 2017, her abstract painting Lines was awarded the bark painting prize at the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. The work was subsequently acquired by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), in Darwin. Yunupingu's exhibitions at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in 2008 and in the Tarnanthi Festival at the Art Gallery of South Australia contained her large wall works. Marking the Infinite was the centrepiece, made up of 45 individual papers reused from discarded print proofs taken from the Yirrkala Print Space. This marks, doubly, the "found" movement of Yirrkala artists as well as what initiated Aboriginal artists permission and foray into using non-natural mediums. These paper paintings and drawings by Yunupingu were the first works on paper to have ever been sold at Buku-Larrnggay. She was selected as one of the featured artists for the 2020 Australia-wide Know My Name initiative of the National Gallery of Australia. Starting on 23 May 2020 (later than scheduled owing to the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia) and running until 25 October 2020, a comprehensive solo exhibition of Yunupingu's work, the moment eternal: Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu, was mounted at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. The exhibition featured more than 60 works, and was the first solo exhibition at MAGNT to feature work by an Aboriginal Australian artist. A catalogue to accompany the exhibition was published. In 2021, Yunupingu won the Wynne Prize for Garak – Night Sky, and the National Gallery of Australia purchased two of her works for inclusion in Part Two of the Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now exhibition. Yunupingu died in Yirrkala on 20 October 2021. Yunupingu's work, alongside ten other Yolngu women artist's works, appeared in the "Bark Ladies" exhibition in 2021. Each artist was chosen for their roles at Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre and for how their art worked to challenge preconceptions of both modern and Indigenous art in Australia. National Gallery of Victoria Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Charles Darwin University Collection Art Gallery of Western Australia 2008: Nyapanyapa – Bark Paintings, Prints and Carvings. Nomad Art Productions, Darwin. 2010: In Sydney Again. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. 2012: Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. 2014: The World is Not a Foreign Land. Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC. 2014: My Sister's Ceremony. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. 2017: Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Awards

2008: 3D Award, 25th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award

Death Yunupingu died on 20 October 2021 in Yirrkala, Northern Territory, Australia.