![Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Budgerigar Dreaming (Version 1) [formerly Budgerigar Dreaming], 1972](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_2400,h_2400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/ws-twocollections/usr/images/artworks/main_image/items/d0/d0e3a1354a0e4e8c914c97c59ae8e3ef/cat19_sup.jpg)
Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa
Budgerigar Dreaming (Version 1) [formerly Budgerigar Dreaming], 1972
Synthetic polymer powder paint and PVA on composition board
18 ⅜ x 12 ½ inches (46.67 x 31.75 cm)
Photo: Tony De Camillo for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University
Provenance
The Artist, painted early 1972
Private Collection, New South Wales
Deutscher-Menzies, 19th and 20th Century Australian and International Painting, Sculpture and Works on Paper, Melbourne, 10 August, 1998, lot 14
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
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
Literature
Deutscher-Menzies, 19th and 20th Century Australian and International Painting, Sculpture and Works on Paper, Melbourne, 10 August, 1998, p. 25
Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, The Miegunyah Press: Melbourne, 2004, p. 64 - 65, 278, (painting 211)
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
"The ten Budgerigar Dreamings of Kaapa Tjampitjinpa were an extraordinary record of the variations a master painter allowed himself in telling a similar story; they were ceremonial stories and yet also instructional and initiating stories for boys of a certain age. The paintings are either sacred-secret, as with Versions 1-4 and 7-10, or modified by Kaapa as regards secrecy, as with Versions 5 and 6. The sacred-secret versions all have ceremonial hats and ceremonial objects, but in Versions 5 and 6 there are no ceremonial hats indicated. The more obviously sacred-secret paintings were represented by a foregrounded double cross framed by equivalent or balanced bullroarers and ceremonial hats." (Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, 2004, p. 64 - 65)
![Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Mikanji [formerly Untitled], 1971](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/ws-twocollections/usr/images/artworks/main_image/items/97/976d7d265613491ba3096503ae16b451/cat05_sup.jpg)