John West Tjupurrula
Images
Biography
Palipalintja, 2025
The work of John West Tjupurrula is informed by his position as the son of two recognised artists who worked through Papunya Tula Artists, Freddy West Tjakamarra and Payu Napaltjarri, as well as his work as a ranger, using drones to survey unimaginably vast expanses of Country. Tjupurrula’s practice is distinctive for its evolution of dot painting to incorporate aerial imagery, regularly painting the sites Winpulpula and Palipalintja.
In Aboriginal Pintupi culture, the land is understood as a living, communicative presence, and one’s relationship to particular sites or stories is encoded in Dreamings, or Tjukurrpa.
Paintings thus come to serve a dual purpose: as veiled depictions of Pintupi ontology as well as a strategy to convey information crucial for safe passage through arid Country. In Tjupurrula’s work, sinuous, interconnected forms and clusters of marks represent songlines, or journeys, taken by Ancestors in the Dreamtime. Sudden changes in colour and certain repeating forms hover on the painted surface - evoking both the ancient stories and geological formations of his Country, and blurring between the veins, pools, and peaks of Country with ancestral beings.
John West Tjupurrula’s (b. 1982, Kintore, Australia) recent exhibitions include West, Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (2025); Community X – Recent Paintings, Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (2024); Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu (Past & Present Together): 50 Years Of Papunya Tula Artists, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Australian Embassy to the United States of America, Washington DC, USA (2023); Kutjungkarrinyi – Gathering Together, Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia (2023); Tjukurrtjanu Irriţitja Tjunta – Belonging to the Dreaming for a long time, Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia (2022); Martupura Tjukurrpa – Important Business, Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia (2021); Papunya: 50 years 1971–2021, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, NSW, Australia (2021); John West Tjupurrula, Agency Projects, Melbourne, VA, Australia (2019).
Works
Palipalintja, 2025
Exhibitions
