Billy Thomas Wangkajunga, circa 1920-2012
Provenance
The Artist, painted at Kununurra, Western Australia, 2004
Red Rock Art, Kununurra, Western Australia, cat. no. KP1988
The Dennis and Debra Scholl Collection, Miami, acquired from the above
Sotheby's, London, Aboriginal Art, 14 March, 2018, Lot 72
Collection of Steve Martin & Anne Stringfield, New York
Exhibitions
No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, Nevada Museum of Art, 13 February - 13 May 2015; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, 20 June - 16 August 2015; Perez Art Museum, Miami, 17 September 2015 - 3 January 2016; Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, 18 January - 15 May 2016; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, New York, 9 June - 14 August 2016
Twenty Aboriginal Paintings, UOVO, New York, 15-19 January 2019
Literature
Henry F. Skerritt, ed. et al, No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, Prestel Verlag, Munich-London-New York, 2014, p. 106, 113 (illus.)
Henry F. Skerritt, No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, Nevada Museum of Art, 2015, p. 112, 159 (illus.)
Steve Martin, Twenty Aboriginal Paintings, UOVO, 2019, p. 21 (illus.)
“One of only three large canvases known to have been painted by Billy Thomas, the subject of this work has a personal resonance for the artist as the ancestral Black Snake Gunambalayi was his personal totem. The painting features sandhills depicted as large concentric ovoids emerging from the periphery of the canvas, permanent freshwater springs in the centre of the painting, and recurring images of the Snake as it traversed the country in a type of ‘time-lapse’ rendition common to desert narrative painting. The colours in the ground of the painting are subsumed in layers of white dotting that lend the painting its luminous quality.” (©Sotheby’s, London, Aboriginal Art, 14 March 2018, Lot 72, Auction catalogue note)