Charlie Tarawa (Tjaruru) Tjungurrayi
Moon Love Dreaming of Man and Woman – Medicine Story, 1971
Synthetic polymer paint on composition board
24 ¼ max x 19 ⅞ inches (61.6 max x 50.48 cm)
Photo: Tony De Camillo for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University
Provenance
The Artist, painted west of Sandy Blight Junction, Western Australia, circa October-December 1971
Stuart Art Centre, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, consignment 8, painting 35, cat. no. 8035
Deutscher-Menzies, Fine Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 29 June 1999, lot 58
Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson, New York
Exhibitions
Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, The Herbert F Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 10 January - 5 April 2009; Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 3 May - 2 August 2009; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, 1 September - 5 December 2009
Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, 30 September 2011- 12 February 2012; Musee du quai Branly, Paris, France, 9 October 2012- 20 January 2013
Abstraction & the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings from Australia’s Western Desert (1971 – Present), Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Utah, 11 September - 12 December 2015
Australian Consulate-General New York, Official Consul General Residence, New York, 5 October 2021 - 20 October 2022
60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, UOVO, New York, May 2023
Publications
Deutscher-Menzies, Fine Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 29 June 1999, p. 49; cover (illus.)
Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2004, p. 300, painting 241
Roger Benjamin, Fred Meyers, Vivien Johnson, et al., Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, The Herbert F Johnson Museum, Cornell University, 2009, p. 92-93 (Forward written by John and Barbara Wilkerson)
Vanessa Merlino and Luke Scholes, 60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, UOVO, 2023 (illus.)
"A classic simplicity of forms show the curved moon representing a woman, the straight line representing a man and the horizontal bars for body paint." (Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, 2004, p. 300)
“Charlie Tarawa’s Moon Love Dreaming of Man and Woman – Medicine Story alone survives from a series of four Medicine Stories on the theme of love magic that Bardon documented in October-December 1971. Elemental traveling lines (brown parallel lines) connect up the “sit-down places” (concentric circles). Within the pictorial frame so formed against the black, U-shapes with a straight bar represent the sexually erect men, and the receptive U-shapes in the women, in Moon Spirit Form.” (Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, 2009, p. 92-93)
Related artworks
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Charlie Tarawa (Tjararu) Tjungurrayi, An Audience with the Queen, 1989 -
Charlie Tarawa (Tjaruru) Tjungurrayi, The Trial, 1972
